Interpark Brand Guidelines: A 1996 Online Mall, Gmarket’s Origin and the NOL Era

An online shopping mall from 1996.

Interpark began inside Dacom, the South Korean telecoms company. Korean Wikipedia says it was set up in November 1995 as an in-house venture and opened the online shopping mall Interpark in June 1996; English Wikipedia names Lee Ki-hyung as its founder. The business news site Bizwatch, looking back in December 2025, noted that when the service started in 1996 the internet was only just spreading across the country, and Korea did not yet have the Naver or Daum search portals.

The mall soon added other lines. Korean Wikipedia dates an online bookshop and a ticket booking service to 1997, and a travel booking service to 1999, the year the company listed on the KOSDAQ market, on 1 July. Bizwatch wrote that Interpark Ticket, covering concerts, sport and musicals, became central to the group, and that the bookshop drew attention by offering free delivery on a single book. In 2000 Interpark was chosen as a ticket sales agent for the 2002 FIFA World Cup, both Wikipedia editions say, and Korean Wikipedia adds that it handled ticket sales for the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics.

The company also gave rise to another Korean marketplace. Bizwatch says Interpark set up an auction-style mall called Goodsdaq in 2000 and rebranded it Gmarket in 2003. English Wikipedia lists that business as Interpark Gmarket, listed on NASDAQ in 2006 and sold to eBay in 2009, while Bizwatch dates the sale to eBay Korea to 2008. In 2011 Interpark opened Blue Square, a performance venue in Hannam-dong, Seoul, with a musical theatre and a concert hall, Korean Wikipedia says. In October 2014 it launched Global Interpark, a site in Korean, English, Chinese and Japanese that English Wikipedia describes as mainly a ticket platform for K-pop concerts, musicals and plays.

Yanolja, Triple and a split.

The recent story is one of separation. On 14 October 2021 TechCrunch reported that Yanolja, the South Korean travel and accommodation platform, had acquired a 70 percent stake in Interpark; a Yanolja spokesperson told the site that Interpark’s services covered shopping, restaurant reservations, travel tickets, attractions and live performances. Bizwatch describes the deal as the split-off of Interpark’s e-commerce business, covering tickets, travel and shopping, and its sale to Yanolja. The Asia Business Daily reported in June 2023 that the Fair Trade Commission had approved the merger in March 2023.

Under Yanolja the businesses were re-sorted. Interpark merged with Triple, a data-driven travel planning platform, in 2022, and on 20 June 2023 it renamed itself Interpark Triple and unveiled a new corporate identity at a media day in Seoul, The Asia Business Daily reported. The shopping and book businesses went another way. They were split off into a new company, Interpark Commerce, in February 2023, and on 31 March 2023 the Singapore-based e-commerce group Qoo10 announced that it would take all of its shares, including the Interpark Shopping and Interpark Books apps, the same paper reported. Interpark said it was selling in order to focus on travel and tickets.

That second branch did not survive. After a payment crisis in July 2024 at Tmon and Wemakeprice, two other Korean platforms in the Qoo10 group, sellers and customers left Interpark Commerce, and on 16 August 2024 it applied to the Seoul Bankruptcy Court for rehabilitation under the court’s autonomous restructuring support programme, The Asia Business Daily reported; Interpark Books had already suspended its service at the end of July. Rehabilitation proceedings began in November 2024, Bizwatch reported, but no buyer was found. The court decided to end the proceedings on 1 December 2025, and on 16 December 2025 it declared Interpark Commerce bankrupt, which sent the company, then the operator of Interpark Shopping and AK Mall, into liquidation, NewDaily reported.

Design and documentation.

South Korea’s online marketplaces present themselves first through their apps. When eBay Korea reworked Gmarket in 2021, The Korea Times reported, the change ran from the logo and a company-made typeface to icons, loading animations and a simpler home screen built around a larger search bar. In 2022 11st carried its new gradient logo onto its app icon, its in-app banners and its “buy” button, the Munhwa Ilbo reported.

Several platforms now publish their design rules. 11st opened a public design-system website in 2024, with logo rules, a house typeface and guidance on colour, grids and icons, according to the design magazine Design Compass, while Gmarket made its Gmarket Sans typeface free for anyone to use. Naming tends to be plain and descriptive. “Open market” is the usual Korean term for a platform on which independent sellers list goods, and membership schemes and sale days carry their own names, such as Gmarket’s Smile Club.

The bookshop chains in this group work across screens and shop floors alike, so their identities reach from websites and apps to delivery boxes, flagship bookshops, reading lounges and campaign graphics. Each guide describes those materials only as the companies themselves publish them, or as dated press reports describe them, and names platforms and stores in the form the companies use in English.

Ownership is part of the story across the sector. Gmarket passed from Interpark to eBay, then to Shinsegae, and into a joint venture with Alibaba; 11st moved between SK companies and outside investors before becoming a subsidiary of SK Planet at the end of 2025. Each guide sets out founders, owners and stock-market listings as dated facts from corporate pages, official registers and independent press, and marks clearly what rests only on a company’s own word.

From Interpark Triple to NOL.

The travel and ticket side continued under Yanolja, with a new parent name. Korean Wikipedia says Interpark Triple merged with Yanolja Platform, Yanolja’s platform subsidiary, in December 2024, with Interpark Triple as the surviving company, which took the name Nol Universe. At a brand event on 6 March 2025 at its new head office, 10X Tower in Seongnam, Nol Universe set out a single consumer brand, NOL: the Yanolja app would become NOL, Interpark Ticket would become NOL Ticket and Interpark Tour would become NOL Interpark Tour, NewDaily and The Fact reported on 7 March 2025. NewDaily said the brand colour chosen was blue, taken from a clear sky. Interpark Global, the platform for foreign visitors, was combined with Triple Korea under the name Interpark Global by NOL, according to the same reports.

The consolidation went further in 2026. On 8 September 2026 NOL Ticket and NOL Interpark Tour were merged into the NOL app, so that their customers could keep their existing bookings by switching to a single NOL membership, ZDNet Korea reported on 17 September 2026. As of that report, NOL ran tickets for performances and entertainment alongside travel and accommodation in one service.

Interpark has also put its name on type. Korean Wikipedia says the company released a typeface, Interpark Gothic, together with a change of corporate identity, offered free for personal, non-commercial use.

For a design guide, Interpark shows how one early online brand can split into businesses with very different fates, and how its name can be absorbed into a newer master brand. Compare Gmarket, the marketplace that began inside Interpark, and Yes24, another Korean online bookshop. For this guide we use a stage red, ink and a sky blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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