Homeplus Brand Guidelines: Samsung’s 1997 Daegu Store, the Tesco Years & a 2025 Rehabilitation

A Samsung trading arm goes into hypermarkets.

Homeplus started inside Samsung C&T, the trading and construction arm of the Samsung group. English Wikipedia says its distribution department opened the first Homeplus hypermarket in Daegu in 1997, followed by a second in western Busan. Two years later the business became a joint venture with the British grocer Tesco, trading as Samsung Tesco.

The Tesco years were the period of fastest growth. In 2008 the chain took over the Korean hypermarkets of E.Land Retail, which had traded as Homever after E.Land bought the Korean business of Carrefour in 2006 and ran 36 hypermarkets under that name; English Wikipedia says all of those stores were rebranded as Homeplus. On 1 March 2011, when the agreement to use the Samsung name ran out, the company changed its legal name from Samsung Tesco to Homeplus. The same year, on 22 November 2011, it opened the first store of a convenience-store brand, Homeplus 365. Alongside the hypermarkets, which English Wikipedia describes as selling everything from groceries to clothing and household appliances, it ran the Homeplus Express supermarket chain and an online shopping service.

Tesco sold the business in September 2015 to MBK Partners, a South Korean buyout firm, which bought it with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Singapore’s Temasek, according to English Wikipedia. The company’s head office is in Gangseo district, Seoul.

A rehabilitation that ran from 2025 into 2026.

The Seoul Bankruptcy Court opened rehabilitation proceedings for Homeplus on 4 March 2025, The Asia Business Daily reported, after a series of credit-rating downgrades; English Wikipedia says MBK had earlier sold and leased back store property, adding rent to the company’s costs.

An amended plan followed in June 2026. The Korea Herald reported on 29 June that the revised filing reflected the sale of the supermarket division, the closure of 37 stores and staff reductions through natural attrition and voluntary redundancy, and that Homeplus intended to sell its remaining units, the hypermarkets, the online business and the head office.

Events then moved quickly. The court ended the proceedings on 3 July 2026 because rescue funding for the plan had not been secured; Homeplus suspended operations at its head office and all of its 67 operating hypermarkets from 13 July, The Asia Business Daily reported, before three companies of Meritz Financial Group approved emergency debtor-in-possession lending on 16 July. Homeplus lodged an immediate appeal on 20 July, Chosun Biz reported. The same Asia Business Daily report noted that some suppliers had cut or paused deliveries as payments slowed during the proceedings, and that many shoppers had moved to other hypermarkets or to online channels. The termination was later cancelled once a financing plan was in place, the stores reopened on 13 August 2026, according to The Korea Herald, and the court approved a rehabilitation plan on 2 September 2026, Chosun Biz reported.

The business has been sold off in parts. The supermarket unit, Homeplus Express, was carved out and sold to Harim Group in June 2026, the Seoul Economic Daily reported in October 2026. Chosun Biz reported in October 2026 that MBK retired all of its shares in Homeplus for no consideration in September, and that the sale manager, Samil PwC, was still seeking buyers for the hypermarket business, open to bids for some of the stores rather than all of them. As of November 2026, Chosun Biz said, 67 of the company’s 126 stores were trading, and The Korea Herald reported that wage payments and electricity bills had fallen into arrears.

How Korean retailers present themselves.

South Korea’s large retailers tend to present themselves through formats before slogans. A single group may run hypermarkets, warehouse stores, supermarkets, convenience stores and online malls side by side, each with its own name on the fascia, and corporate pages usually open with a timeline: the first branch, the district it stood in, the year it opened, and then each new format as it was added.

The big-box stores carry much of their identity on the shelf. Hypermarkets sell groceries alongside clothing, household goods and electronics under one roof, and own labels give them names to point to in the aisle, from value ranges to premium ready meals. Warehouse formats lean on large packs and goods shown in boxes or on pallets, so that the display itself signals the way the store sells.

Department stores and convenience chains work at opposite scales. Department-store groups put their weight into the building, the façade and the flagship in a city centre, while convenience chains rely on a short name and a bright fascia that has to read from a street corner and repeat across a large network of small shops. Beauty and lifestyle chains, and the apps that sit alongside all of these stores, carry the same names into a much smaller frame.

Behind the shop fronts sit corporate structures that the companies set out in plain terms: founding groups, spin-offs, joint ventures with foreign retailers, private-equity owners and listings on the Korea Exchange. Names have changed as partners arrived or left, and some chains have gone through court-supervised rehabilitation. For a designer, that history explains why a fascia, a logotype or an own-label pack looks the way it does today.

One name across hypermarket, supermarket and corner shop.

The name did most of the branding work. A single word, Homeplus, ran across the hypermarkets, the Homeplus Express supermarkets and the Homeplus 365 convenience stores, and it outlasted both of its original partners: Samsung left the corporate name in 2011, and Tesco sold out in 2015. The Homever stores taken over in 2008 were brought under the same name rather than kept as a second fascia, English Wikipedia says.

Own labels gave the stores their own products to point to. The Korea Herald named two in June 2026 as signatures of the chain: Bomeokdwae, a barley-fed pork, and Simplus, Homeplus’s private-label brand; the paper reported that shoppers had found both harder to come by as stores closed.

The chain has continued to sell under its own name during the court process. In November 2026 it ran a discount event called “Homepl is back,” Chosun Biz reported, restocking several thousand lines of fresh food and household goods. A Money Today report from the same month described the Gangseo branch, which the paper called the company’s flagship store, with thinly stocked fresh-food and seafood counters, as suppliers were asking for payment in advance. Homeplus Express now trades under Harim’s ownership.

For a design guide, Homeplus shows how one plain retail name can carry a business through several owners and a court-supervised rescue. Compare Emart, the Shinsegae-founded hypermarket chain, and Lotte Mart. For this guide we use a basket red, a deep claret and a warm white with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Homeplus’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.