Zigzag Brand Guidelines: Dongdaemun Shops, KakaoStyle and a Cool-Pink 2022 Rebrand

A favourites app for Dongdaemun web shops.

Zigzag is a South Korean shopping app for women’s fashion, launched in June 2015 by Croquis.com, a company whose chief executive is Seo Jeong-hoon. The Asia Business Daily described it in July 2020 as a service that brings together women’s online shopping malls selling clothing from Dongdaemun in Seoul, and its 2021 reports kept the same description. Users could save their favourite shops in one place and receive personalised product recommendations, the paper said, with an interface built for the phone.

The early numbers were modest. The same newspaper said about 300 shopping malls were listed when the app launched, a figure that had grown to about 3,700 by mid-2020, when the app had been downloaded more than 20 million times and had about 3 million monthly users. Design Plus, the Korean design magazine, later summed up the route in a sentence: Zigzag began in 2015 as an app for bookmarking shopping malls and established itself after adding an integrated payment service in 2019.

That payment service, Z Payment, arrived in October 2019, The Asia Business Daily reported; it lets a shopper pay for products from several different malls with a single login. In January 2021 Croquis.com opened Zigzag Partners, a website for shops wishing to join, which explained how to link products and orders to the app in real time, how Z Payment works and how its AI-based advertising is used, the paper reported.

Kakao, KakaoStyle and a television campaign.

By early 2021 Zigzag had drawn the attention of a much larger technology group. On 14 April 2021 Kakao, the company behind the KakaoTalk messenger, announced that it would spin off the style division of its subsidiary Kakao Commerce, which ran a fashion service called Kakao Style, and merge it with Croquis.com, The Asia Business Daily reported. The merged company would become a Kakao subsidiary led by Seo Jeong-hoon. At that point the app gathered more than 4,000 online shopping malls and fashion brands, the paper said.

Korea JoongAng Daily, reporting the deal on 19 April 2021, placed it in a wider move by Korean e-commerce groups into fashion platforms: in the same period SSG.com, the Shinsegae group’s online arm, bought the women’s fashion platform W Concept, and Naver invested in Brandi. The paper wrote that Kakao hoped to link Zigzag with Talk Gift, the gift-sending function inside its messenger, and noted that Zigzag uses artificial intelligence to recommend products based on what users have bought before.

The merger was completed on 1 July 2021, when the combined company launched under the name KakaoStyle. Zigzag kept its service name, while Kakao’s older curation service called Kakao Style was renamed Fashion by Kakao, The Asia Business Daily reported. Seo Jeong-hoon remained chief executive.

The same spring brought Zigzag’s most talked-about advertising. On 19 April 2021 The Asia Business Daily reported that the app had passed 30 million cumulative downloads, about a year after reaching 20 million, and that a large brand campaign had begun with the actress Youn Yuh-jung, whose television commercial was released on 16 April. Design Plus later wrote that lines from that campaign became popular and gave the brand strong recall, but that its visual identity had not yet been settled.

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.

A fashion-magazine identity, 2022.

The identity was settled in 2022. On 22 August 2022 KakaoStyle unveiled a new brand identity for Zigzag, a sweeping renewal of the app’s look and voice seven years after its 2015 launch, according to Design Plus, which interviewed the team in October 2022. The magazine said the renewal moved Zigzag from a “fashion app” to “style commerce”, adding beauty, living and lifestyle categories and a new content tab called Discovery, and that the logo and colour system were overhauled at the same time. The overall concept, Design Plus said, was the fashion magazine. Creative direction was credited to Shim Jun-yong, head of KakaoStyle’s creative division, who told the magazine that the earlier identity had lacked consistency. By then more than 10,000 stores were listed on the app, the magazine reported, and Zigzag was running trial operations in Japan, the United States and Canada.

The Korean design news site Design Compass, writing on 25 August 2022, described the visible changes: the wordmark switched to a tall typeface, the main colour became a cool-toned pink, and the app’s catchphrase changed. The design studio Porto Rocha also lists the Zigzag rebrand among its projects, crediting members of Zigzag’s own team alongside its designers. Porto Rocha says it drew on the typography of fashion periodicals to redraw the wordmark, with a condensed “Z” that works as a shorthand for the brand, and that it made the signature pink fresher, brighter and cooler while adding a wider palette. The studio says clean sans-serif typefaces were chosen in Korean and Latin with similar characteristics and weights, naming Haffer, Kanyon and Noto Sans KR, and that it also made a photography system and a set of 3D stickers for social media.

For a design guide, Zigzag shows how a platform built from thousands of small shops can give itself one editorial voice. Compare Musinsa, another Korean fashion platform, and Kakao, its parent group. For this guide we use a cool pink, ink plum and pale lilac with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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