Yuhan Brand Guidelines: Yu Il-han’s 1926 Seoul Drug House, a Willow Mark and Leclaza

A returning émigré and an import business in Seoul.

Yuhan was founded in Seoul on 10 December 1926 by Yu Il-han, known in the United States as Ilhan New. Its Korean name, Yuhan Yanghaeng, is written in hanja as 柳韓洋行, and the first character is the founder’s surname, which means willow. English Wikipedia says Yu was born in Pyongyang in 1895 and was sent to the United States as a boy in 1904, where he grew up in Nebraska, studied commerce at the University of Michigan and, in 1922, started the bean-sprout business La Choy Food Products in Detroit.

According to English Wikipedia, Yu returned to Korea, then under Japanese rule, in October 1926 and set up Yuhan that December, importing medicines from the United States and selling them to hospitals. Korean Wikipedia says the business began as an importer and seller of medicines in Jongno, in central Seoul, and that its first medicine developed in-house was Antiphlamine, an ointment, in 1933. English Wikipedia credits Yuhan with being the first company in East Asia to sell the drug Prontosil.

The company’s own history says it became a joint-stock company in 1936 and built a factory at Sosa, in Gyeonggi Province, now part of Bucheon. Korean Wikipedia adds that at that point 24 of the company’s 77 employees were listed as shareholders, because a large number of shares had been given to staff.

The war years are part of the record. English Wikipedia says Yu left Korea in April 1938 on a long business trip to Europe and the United States and, after the Pacific War began in December 1941, could not return; in Korea, it says, the Japanese authorities strictly regulated Yuhan because they saw its founder as an American influence. In the United States Yu worked with groups supporting the Korean Provisional Government and advised the American Office of Strategic Services; from January 1945, English Wikipedia says, he trained for Project NAPKO, a plan to send Korean agents into Korea that never went ahead. The company’s history records a trading company, Yuhan Trading, in 1941 and the move of its head office to the Sosa factory in 1942. Yu returned in July 1946 and resumed control of the company. Korean Wikipedia says the Korean War of 1950 halted medicine production at Sosa.

A listed company run by its own staff.

In November 1962 Yuhan listed its shares on the Korean stock exchange — the first drug maker in Korea to do so, the company says — and finished a building at Daebang-dong, in Seoul’s Dongjak district, which is still its home. In 1969 Yu handed the presidency to a company executive who was not a relative, and the company says that every president since has risen through its own ranks. Yu left his fortune to society, the company says, and today its largest shareholders are the Yuhan Foundation and the Yuhan school foundation, both public-interest bodies.

The company grew through partnerships. Its history lists Yuhan-Kimberly, a joint venture with Kimberly-Clark, in 1970; Yuhan Corax in 1977, later renamed Yuhan-Clorox and the maker of the household bleach Yuhanrox, according to Korean Wikipedia; a joint venture with the Korea Institute of Science and Technology in 1980; and Korea Janssen, with Johnson & Johnson, in 1983. Over the same years it sold medicines under licence from American and European drug makers, and built its own range of household medicines: Korean Wikipedia dates the vitamin Bicomc to 1963, when it launched as Bicom tablets.

Production moved several times. The company says it opened a factory at Gunpo in 1979, a central research centre at Giheung, in Yongin, in 2005, and in 2006 moved its factory to Ochang, in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province. It also lists ventures abroad, including a joint company in India set up in 1992.

The most widely reported product of recent years is lazertinib, a lung-cancer drug sold in Korea as Leclaza. Yuhan says Leclaza received conditional approval in Korea in 2021. In November 2018, Drug Discovery and Development reported, Yuhan licensed global rights outside Korea to Janssen, Johnson & Johnson’s pharmaceutical arm, which took on development, manufacturing and sales, while Yuhan kept Korea. On 19 August 2024 the US Food and Drug Administration approved lazertinib, under the name Lazcluze, for use with Janssen’s amivantamab in a form of non-small cell lung cancer, according to the FDA. English Wikipedia says the European Union approved it in January 2025.

Design and documentation.

Korean and Chinese drug makers tend to introduce themselves through places as much as products. Their annual reports and websites lead with research campuses: new buildings in Shanghai and Suzhou, and the technology district of Pangyo, south of Seoul. Chia Tai Tianqing, for example, says it moved its global research headquarters to Shanghai in 2023, and Hengrui says it opened research offices in Princeton and Basel in 2020.

The pictures inside those reports follow a familiar pattern. White-coated scientists work at screens and fume hoods; long packaging lines carry tablets and vials; and the older companies keep a place for their beginnings, with founders and first factories shown in archive photographs. Several of the businesses in this group began as municipal or state factories decades before they became listed research companies.

Trade fairs are the other stage. The companies take booths at the BIO International Convention in the United States and at the large pharmaceutical fairs in China, where licensing talks with international partners are now a regular part of the business. Hengrui’s July 2025 licensing agreement with GSK is one recent example. In this guide, such deals are named without sums, and any deal not confirmed as completed is described as pending.

The visual identities themselves are mostly corporate and restrained: usually a wordmark in red, blue or green, with photography doing most of the work. Few of these companies publish brand guidelines or official colour values, so the palettes in this guide are our own unofficial interpretations, chosen to sit alongside the companies’ public materials without copying them.

A woodcut gift that became a corporate symbol.

Yuhan’s symbol has an origin story the company tells on its own website. In 1925, it says, Yu visited Philip Jaisohn (Seo Jae-pil), a Korean patriot he admired, and told him of his plan to improve the nation’s health through a drug business. Jaisohn gave him a woodcut of a single willow tree with full branches and leaves, carved by Jaisohn’s daughter — a play on Yu’s surname — as a wish that the venture would grow like a great willow. The company says the woodcut became Yuhan’s mark when it was founded in 1926 and, with some changes, remains its symbol today. Korean Wikipedia lists decades of slogans built around the “willow mark” from 1961 onward, including “The symbol of trust — the willow mark,” which it dates from 1989 to the present.

The company’s corporate-identity page sets out a simple system: the willow symbol and the Yuhan logotype are combined side by side in fixed proportions that may not be altered. The symbol must appear in a green the company calls Yuhan Green in every medium, in black for black-and-white printing, and in gold or silver only where a special effect is needed; no other colours are allowed.

Yuhan reached its hundredth anniversary in 2026, and Korean Wikipedia records the anniversary slogan “100 years of trust, 100 years of promise.” The founder remains central to how the company presents itself: its website describes him as an entrepreneur, independence activist and educator, and South Korea’s government awarded him the Order of Merit for National Foundation in 1995, English Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, Yuhan shows how a single founding image — a willow, chosen for a surname — can carry a company for a century, kept to one green with strict rules. Compare Hanmi, a Seoul drug maker founded almost fifty years later, and GC Biopharma. For this guide we use a willow green, a dark pine ink and an old gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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