Kurly Brand Guidelines: Market Kurly, Overnight Grocery Delivery and Kurly N Mart

A grocery start-up built on overnight delivery.

Kurly was set up in Seoul at the end of 2014. Korean Wikipedia, citing the company’s filings, gives its founding date as 31 December 2014 and names its predecessor company as The Farmers. Its grocery service, Market Kurly, launched in 2015: Chosun Biz reported in May 2025 that the service was marking its tenth anniversary on 21 May that year, and The Korea Herald and TechCrunch both give 2015 as the year the business began.

The founder is Sophie Kim (Kim Seul-a), whom TechCrunch described in January 2023 as a former investment banker; The Korea Herald identified her in September 2025 as the company’s founder and chief executive. Korean Wikipedia lists her among the shareholders, alongside financial investors including Sequoia Capital, Hillhouse Capital and Anchor Equity Partners, and the internet company Naver.

The service was built on early-morning delivery of fresh food. Korean Wikipedia describes the Saetbyeol (“morning star”) delivery as taking orders for vegetables, fruit and other fresh food until 11 p.m. and delivering them before 7 a.m. the next day, and says the company keeps goods at controlled temperatures from the moment they arrive to the moment they are delivered. The Korea Herald wrote in October 2024 that the cost of maintaining that cold chain had kept the company in deficit for years. Korean Wikipedia lists logistics centres at Gimpo, Jangji, Pyeongtaek and Changwon, and a delivery subsidiary, Kurly Nextmile.

From groceries to beauty.

Kurly widened its range while it prepared to list on the stock exchange. TechCrunch reported in January 2023 that it had moved into cosmetics, personal-care products and other goods beyond groceries. Its beauty platform, Beauty Kurly, launched in 2022, according to The Korea Herald, which said the idea came from core customers who were already buying premium shampoos, soaps and other personal-care products through Market Kurly.

The paper described those core customers in 2024 as professional women in their 30s to 50s, and The Asia Business Daily reported that most visitors at the 2025 beauty festival were women in their 20s to 40s, which it called Kurly’s main audience.

The beauty side now has its own public event, held at Dongdaemun Design Plaza in central Seoul. The Beauty Kurly Festa 2024 featured more than 90 brands and drew over 20,000 visitors, The Korea Herald reported. For 2025, The Asia Business Daily reported, the four-day festival returned to the plaza’s Art Hall from 30 October with fewer, larger booths — 60 instead of 94 — and an exhibition space called “The Garden of Me.”

The 2026 edition opened in the same hall on 12 November, Seoul Economic Daily reported. Its layout followed a day’s routine through four zones named Morning, Day, Evening and Night, and Kurly chose 45 brands, about 73 percent of them independent labels, the paper said.

The stock-market listing has not happened. TechCrunch reported that Kurly passed the Korea Exchange’s preliminary listing screening on 22 August 2022, and that in January 2023 the company postponed the offering, citing weak market sentiment. In September 2025 Sophie Kim told a commerce event at Naver that the company remained open to a listing but that the decision would depend on market conditions, The Korea Herald reported.

Platforms, shops and boxes.

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.

A grocery shelf inside Naver.

Kurly’s most visible recent move has been outside its own app. Kurly and Naver signed a strategic partnership in April 2025, The Asia Business Daily reported, and on 4 September 2025 they launched Kurly N Mart, a grocery store inside the Naver Plus Store shopping platform. Korea JoongAng Daily reported that it sells Kurly’s premium and private-label products alongside fresh groceries and daily necessities, that orders placed before 11 p.m. arrive the next morning through Kurly’s cold-chain network, and that it was the first time Kurly had sold beyond its own app and website. The paper added that the store mirrors the design and user experience of Kurly’s existing platform.

Kurly Nextmile joined Naver’s fulfilment alliance in the same week, so that products from Naver’s Smart Store sellers can also be delivered in the early morning, Korea JoongAng Daily reported.

Kurly’s own messaging has shifted with age. Chosun Biz reported that for the tenth anniversary of the service in May 2025 the company moved its campaigns from the early-morning delivery it had first stressed toward the quality of its products, including a weekly online video series, “Sophie’s Kick,” in which the founder presents items from the range, from tteokbokki to meal kits.

Kurly has also tested selling abroad. Chosun Biz reported in May 2025 that it opened brand stores on Singapore’s RedMart and Hong Kong’s TV Mall in 2022 to sell frozen ready meals — TechCrunch identified RedMart as the grocery app owned by Alibaba’s Lazada — and placed its home-meal products in H Mart in the United States in September 2024. The Korea Herald reported that in late August 2025 it launched Kurly USA, a cross-border platform delivering Korean goods to customers in the United States within 48 hours. At home it also runs a quick-commerce service called Kurly Now, Seoul Economic Daily reported in November 2026.

For a design guide, Kurly shows how a delivery service can carry its identity through partner platforms and live events as much as through its own app. Compare Naver, its partner on Kurly N Mart, and Coupang, another Seoul online retailer that delivers fresh groceries. For this guide we use a deep plum, lilac and a dawn grey with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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