LG Chem Brand Guidelines: Lucky Cream 1947, a 2020 Battery Spin-Off & a Five-Circle Wave

From a face cream to plastics, PVC and petrochemicals.

LG Chem dates its history to January 1947, when Lucky Chemical was set up to make cosmetics, according to the company’s own history page. English Wikipedia lists Koo In-hwoi as its president from 1947 to 1965, and Korean Wikipedia names its first product as Lucky Cream, a face cream. Korean Wikipedia says the firm turned to plastics after the caps of its cream jars kept breaking, and began making plastic goods in 1952; the company’s timeline records a move to Bujeon-dong in Busan in November 1951 and what it calls Korea’s first injection-moulded synthetic resin products.

Household goods followed. Korean Wikipedia credits the firm with Lucky toothpaste in 1954 and, from 1964, a synthetic detergent called Hi-Tai; the company’s timeline lists a detergent factory at Anyang in March 1966, the year the name became Lucky Chemical Industries. It listed on the Korea Stock Exchange in October 1969 and became Lucky Ltd. in February 1974. In the 1970s it moved into petrochemicals: a PVC paste resin plant at the Yeosu complex opened in 1976, a polystyrene plant there in 1985 and an acrylate plant at Naju in 1987, the timeline says.

The present name arrived in February 1995, when Lucky Ltd. was renamed LG Chem, the company says. In April 2001 the business was split three ways, into the holding company LGCI, LG Chem and LG Household & Health Care; LG Life Sciences followed in 2002 and the industrial-materials business, LG Hausys, in 2009. Korean Wikipedia therefore treats today’s LG Chem as a company formed in 2001 out of the 1947 business, while the company itself keeps 1947 as its founding year and marked its 70th anniversary in 2017 by merging LG Life Sciences back in.

Petrochemicals, batteries and a spin-off.

Petrochemicals remain one of LG Chem’s three businesses, alongside advanced materials and life sciences, according to its website. The petrochemicals company is organised into divisions for naphtha cracking and propylene oxide, PVC and plasticisers, ABS, acrylates and superabsorbent polymers, and high-performance materials. Its timeline records cracker expansions at Yeosu and at Daesan, where LG Daesan Petrochemicals was set up in 2005 and merged into LG Chem in 2006, with LG Petrochemicals following in November 2007. In June 2003 it bought Hyundai Petrochemicals in a consortium with Honam Petrochemical, the company now called Lotte Chemical. Abroad, it bought India’s Hindustan Polymers in 1996 and built ABS plants at Ningbo and Guangzhou in China.

Batteries grew out of the same research base. LG Chem produced Korea’s first lithium-ion batteries in 1999, English Wikipedia says, and opened its first electric-vehicle battery factory at Ochang in 2011, according to the company’s timeline. On 1 December 2020 the battery business was launched as a standalone company, LG Energy Solution, Yonhap reported. LG Chem kept a majority holding, which English Wikipedia puts at 81 per cent, and LG Energy Solution began trading in Seoul on 27 January 2022 after what the Korea Times, carrying a Reuters report, called Korea’s biggest initial public offering.

The company has since leaned toward materials and medicines. It bought LG Electronics’ separator business in November 2021 and completed the purchase of the US cancer-drug developer AVEO Pharmaceuticals in January 2023, Yonhap reported. Its timeline lists a compostable plastic called COMPOSTFUL in 2023, a pyrolysis oil plant at Dangjin in 2024 and a joint venture with Eni, LG-Eni BioRefining, in December 2024.

One serious incident belongs in the record. On 7 May 2020 a styrene vapour leak occurred at the LG Polymers India plant near Visakhapatnam. The next day India’s National Green Tribunal ordered the subsidiary to make an interim deposit with the district magistrate, and a high-level committee set up under the tribunal’s chair reported on 28 May 2020, attributing the leak to failures in storage and operating procedures, according to English Wikipedia’s account citing the Press Trust of India and the Associated Press.

Design and documentation.

Petrochemical makers sell materials most people never see on their own: ethylene and propylene, and the pellets of polyethylene, polypropylene and PVC that other companies turn into film, bottles, pipes and car parts. With no product on a shop shelf, the company name has to do most of the work, and many of these firms present it as a bold corporate wordmark, often in capitals or a heavy sans, set on plain white pages.

Colour tends to be cool and sober. Blues and greens recur across the trade’s websites and reports, and pictures lean on the plants themselves: crackers, columns and pipe racks photographed at dusk, lit against a dark sky, or tanker ships and rail terminals at the edge of a port. The plant is the product, so the plant becomes the image.

The websites follow a shared structure. Product pages are usually organised by polymer family — polyethylene, polypropylene, PVC and the rest — with grades, process technologies and trademarked range names, and with applications grouped by market: packaging, cars and construction are the usual first three. Many makers now give equal space to circularity and recycling, with pages for recycled or renewable-based ranges and chemical recycling projects, and publish annual safety, sustainability and community reports as part of the same identity.

The makers in this guide share that vocabulary but come from different histories: mergers of older companies, buyouts of single plants, joint ventures between oil groups and family conglomerates. This guide sets out who founded each one, who owns it and how its name came about, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

An LG Group symbol and a five-circle wave.

LG Chem does not have a symbol of its own. Its website describes the logo as the LG Group’s corporate symbol, the “Face of the Future,” paired with a logotype spelling out the company’s official name. The symbol is meant to read as the face of an energetic young person, with the letters L and G placed inside a circle to put people at the centre of the group’s management. The company says the symbol may not be used on its own and the logotype may not be altered. Its logo colours are LG Red and LG Gray, with gray, black, silver and gold allowed only in limited cases.

Over the group mark sits a newer brand identity. Since announcing the vision “We connect science to life for a better future” in May 2020, LG Chem has described its brand as “leading with science for sustainability,” built on two keywords, science and sustainability. Its visual system uses a wave motif that smoothly connects five circles, drawn in outline or solid form and cropped or turned in different directions, and a colour system that runs as a gradient from magenta and purple to light blue and a deep blue, with a light gray. Its eco-friendly materials sit under a separate brand, LETZero, launched in July 2021. Korean Wikipedia lists the slogans that came before, from a 1960s line promising that the Lucky mark guaranteed quality to “Solution Partner,” used from 2008.

For a design guide, LG Chem shows how a business-to-business company can borrow a group symbol and still build a distinct visual language on top of it. Compare SK Innovation, another Korean group’s energy and chemicals arm, and Lotte Chemical, its partner in the 2003 Hyundai Petrochemicals purchase. For this guide we use a deep crimson, magenta, violet and a sea blue on warm grays with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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