Founder Spotlight: Sophie Kim on Building a Brand Customers Love with Kurly
Sophie Kim’s first food memory, from around the age of four, is gat-kimchi with bori-gulbi, a pungent mustard-leaf kimchi paired with salt-cured dried fish. It was grown-up food, and the start of a grown-up palate.
After graduating from Wellesley College, she spent about eight years in finance and consulting, working throughout Asia. Through it all, food stayed her preoccupation, and colleagues came to ask her which butcher was good that season and which farmer grew the best apples.
She returned to Korea at 31 and found the weekly grocery shop dispiriting. “The food shopping experience was horrible,” as she later put it. Her diagnosis was that Korean retailers had built their business around real estate, securing locations in dense traffic areas and treating quality and selection as afterthoughts, when quality and selection were the whole point from the customer’s perspective. So she went around the system, ordering direct from farmers she tracked down herself.
That workaround became a company. Kim founded The Farmers, later renamed Kurly, at the end of 2014 with co-founder Park Gil-nam, whom she had met in a food club at a former workplace. In May 2015, they launched an idea Korea had not seen before. It was called saetbyeol, or dawn star, delivery: fresh food ordered by 11 p.m. arrives at the door by 7 a.m.
Kurly now delivers before dawn in greater Seoul and in many cities across the country, including Busan, Daegu, and Gwangju, which covers 54 percent of the total households in Korea, and reaches Jeju Island the next day. What started with a handful of grocery items has grown into tens of thousands of products, and the company has expanded well past food into beauty and fashion.
In this conversation, Kim talks about the founding years of Kurly, the logistics behind dawn delivery, her vision for the company, and advice she has for founders building today.
Kurly introduced dawn delivery to Korea, and you’ve said the idea began with a personal problem. Where does the story start?
With food, and with the fact that I loved it too much to accept how hard eating well had become. I grew up on my grandmother’s cooking. She was from Andong and set a full table from the morning, and it took leaving home to learn that a life like that is a remarkable thing. Through every job I ever had, food stayed my biggest preoccupation. If lunch was disappointing, my whole day dimmed. Colleagues remembered exactly one thing about me: Sophie really loves to eat. They came to me to ask which butcher was good that season and which farmer grew good apples, and I would pass along the farmer’s phone number.
Coming back to Korea at 31, my body had changed. I had developed atopic dermatitis and some allergies while living abroad. Changing what I ate changed my health, and that experience made me exacting about food and convinced me that eating well and living well is enormously important and difficult. So in Seoul I did what any obsessive would do: I sourced things myself. I wanted big kale for juicing, so I found a farmer online, called him, and asked him to ship to someone in Seoul.
Doing that for two or three years put two problems right in front of me. The farmers I bought from kept quitting. The elderly farmer who grew my organic apples gave up his orchard before we ever founded Kurly. And what did arrive by courier often arrived ruined. At some point I thought: why should eating have to be like this? Could I fix it? Could I simply eat well? The beginning really was that simple.
The pain ran on both sides. Customers could hardly find food they trusted, and producers who made wonderful things struggled to distribute them. So I wanted a service where producers concentrate purely on making good products and customers can buy good quality as a given, without worrying. The moment I understood that one solution could serve both, it felt like a breakthrough for the whole industry was within reach. I started Kurly out of a longing to solve a meaningful problem worth staking my life on, so that ordinary people could shop easily for ingredients once found only at the farm gate, and anyone could enjoy a small happiness at the table and live a healthy, full life.
You spent eight years at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Temasek, and Bain. What moved you to leave and build a company?
I had planned an entirely different life. I studied political science and always assumed my path led to academia, right up to conversations about a doctorate in development economics. The professor I hoped would supervise me said that if I entered graduate school then, I would become a lopsided scholar with a big head on one side and no knowledge of the real economy, and that if I came back after understanding markets, I would become a far greater one. It felt like being struck hard on the head. So I went to learn the market firsthand, at Goldman Sachs. Development economics has stayed with me ever since. Reading it in my downtime still feels like healing.
Through all four workplaces, food stayed the constant. I basically spent my salary on eating. At Bain I even advised food companies that the industry needed to change. Along the way, my test for a startup idea crystallized. Starting a company is hard, whichever idea you choose, so choose the idea you can refuse to abandon. Fresh-food retail looked, to everyone, like the worst possible idea. Difficult, a red ocean, giant competitors. Pick the idea you believe in almost religiously, then make it work, and the odds are far better. My belief was concrete. If this service didn’t exist, I would be unhappy for the rest of my life wherever I worked, so it had to be solved before I died. In the hardest stretches, when I wanted to give up, that same thought kept me in my seat, and I found I could never quit.
I also ran the downside honestly. My constant thought is that even if this fails, I won’t die and I won’t starve. Had I believed a failure would wreck my life, I could never have started anything. Since neither starving nor dying was on the table, the sensible move was to try, to fail fast, and at minimum to learn something. I made the decision at 31, newly married, and my husband cheered me on. If I could pull in even 100,000 consumers with the work I love, I thought, that alone would be enough.
What do you remember from the early days of Kurly?
How little we started with, and how much fun it was. At launch, we had seven or eight products. Our free-shipping threshold was 40,000 won, roughly 28 US dollars at the time, so you could buy everything we sold and still fall short of free shipping. What I needed to know was very basic. If we sell good lettuce, good apples, good eggs, will even one customer buy? And will being handed groceries at dawn feel strange? You can only learn that by opening, so we opened with what we could source and tested it out.
On the first night, we received about 15 orders. One was my mother and another was my aunt, so the real customers numbered about 10. I was so grateful that I called every one of them to say thank you and ask how on earth they had found us.
Nearly every product carried a story. There was a butcher in Majang-dong I loved, Born&Bred, which sold hanwoo (Korean beef) in blocks of one or two kilos, and I was determined that Kurly would sell their beef in portions sized for one or two people. We went before our service had even launched, so they had no idea what Kurly was. Kurly barely existed. Kurly’s MDs and I would show up at dawn after the butchers finished their work and clean the stairs, because meat work leaves debris and cleaning was the only useful thing we could offer while we explained ourselves, visit after visit. The whole of my thinking then was that we must sell this, so we keep going until it works.
An abalone producer joined us in June 2015, one month in. He doubted live abalone could survive delivery, so we promised that if any customer received a dead one, we would refund it ourselves. He quietly tested us by asking a relative near Seoul to place an order, and when the abalone arrived within a day, alive and in beautiful condition, he began introducing us to the good producers and fishermen he knew.
Behind the romance, it was relentless. Running a company means a thousand jobs nobody warns you about. In all those years of employment, I had never once wondered how payroll got done. Suddenly someone had to do it, and that someone was me. In the earliest days, our stated goal as we went home each night was simply to make it back to the office tomorrow.
Because we deliver at night, the Kurly leadership team and I have never slept a night through since. We wake mid-sleep to check the orders, check on our delivery managers, check that everything is safe. When people ask whether a life like that is good, for me it truly is. I sleep less, and at 7 a.m. the food I wanted is at my door.
You’ve said the funding years were hard. How did you get through it?
By keeping a list. It was our second year, right around the Series A, and the money had run out completely. I pitched more than 100 times, and every one failed. Because we had no money, I went wherever anyone would see me. One venture firm wouldn’t let me up to the office. A partner bought me a coffee on the ground floor and passed along that he had only taken the meeting as a favor to an acquaintance, so I should finish the coffee and head home. That part, honestly, was fine.
One meeting left a real wound. An investor told me afterward that plenty of good businesses and good founders go uninvested anyway, and that in my case he found the business unclear, he didn’t know me as a person, and on top of that I was a married woman who might have a child. Why would he take on that risk? One of the early members of Kurly was next to me and said, let’s just go. Before we left, I told him: if you have no conviction in the business, that is on us for explaining it poorly. If you don’t know my ability, that is on me for failing to show it. But my being a woman I honestly cannot change. That part is me, and I am sorry. If passing on that too is required, then raising money here will be truly difficult. I apologized and walked out. It was a shock at the time.
Even in that year, I slept at night. Losing sleep changes nothing, so I wrote out the full list of solutions we could still try and worked through them one by one. Watching the list shrink was frightening, and it was also the best we could do.
Our culture is that we keep going until it works, and it applied to money too. Turned down by 100 firms, we went to the 101st and the 102nd. We ended up taking early money from three investors, and every one of those checks came after the 90th pitch.
My body kept score of that period. Hundred-hour weeks, never once leaving the office on the day I arrived, and a case of shingles in early 2016 that I treated with painkillers for months, assuming I was simply tired. One of our early investors eventually sat me down about it. A leader whose condition is always poor will make bad decisions, so learn to care for and manage yourself. I started managing my health the next year.
What ultimately worked with investors was radical transparency about the numbers. Investors are people who look at numbers, so the essential capability is converting every part of the company’s operations into figures. How many users, how much per basket, what each delivery costs. Then explaining persuasively how those figures become profit. From our first round to our most recent, we have pulled our core operating indicators daily and disclosed them in detail at least monthly. Where we did better and why, where we did worse and why, and how we would do better next.
Dawn delivery became Kurly’s signature, and it is now common across Korean retail. What sits underneath it?
Dawn delivery was one method for realizing the value Kurly set out to deliver: truly good food brought to you in its freshest possible state. Kurly’s essence has always lived in good products and in the merchandising capability to source them by whatever means necessary.
The industry name for the underlying problem is farm-to-table time. Most making happens by day, whether that is baking bread or processing abalone, so the fastest route from the moment something is made to the customer’s table runs through the night. We set the golden window at 24 hours from production, and hitting that window meant using the dawn. Night solved several problems at once. Thinking about my own workdays, a package that arrives by day sits at the door while you are at the office, and you spend the afternoon anxious about it. Delivered before 7 a.m., it’s there when you wake. Producers love the structure too, because their product’s quality survives the journey intact.
The genuinely hard part sits upstream, in the supply chain. Dawn delivery is honestly the easiest piece of our logistics. Take our Jeju hairtail. A week ahead, we place a firm order for the number of fish to be caught on a given morning. From 11 p.m. the night before, customers buy against that promised stock. At dawn the fisherman catches the fish. By around 11 a.m., they arrive at Moseulpo Harbor and are processed. By mid-afternoon they reach Gimpo, and at 5 p.m., they enter our fulfillment center, where they are matched to the waiting orders and go out for delivery by 7 a.m. the next morning. Hairtail on the table less than 24 hours out of the water. Change any single link, and the wait lengthens or the freshness breaks. Our longest lead time makes the same point from the other end: a panettone from Italy that we order every December 26 for arrival the following December 1. One product, a one-year forecast.
Under it all sit two commitments. The first is 100 percent direct purchase, applied without exception to every product, a first in Korean retail. We commit to quantities in advance, we own the inventory, we carry the disposal risk, and the producer concentrates purely on making. Direct purchase benefits the customer, the producer, and us all at once. The reason nobody had done it was the risk, so we decided to become very good at managing risk.
The second is the full cold chain, from the production site to the customer’s front door, with seven or eight distinct temperature bands inside what people casually call refrigerated. Poultry held at two degrees, leaf vegetables warmer so they take no cold damage. In our first years, people told us flatly that a startup had no business committing to something this expensive. Wasn’t it reckless? We did it because it was the only way I could stop worrying about the box at my own door, and the only way to tell a producer that their product will reach the customer exactly as they made it.
Every product Kurly sells has to pass the product committee. How does it work, and why keep the bar that high?
When I founded the company, I made myself one promise. We would sell only food we had eaten ourselves and would buy ourselves. So every product ever sold on Kurly has passed our internal product selection committee. It has met every Friday since the beginning, and I still sit on it every week, 11 years in.
The MDs, marketing, brand, and all the product-facing teams gather with me, and we eat. We taste roughly 200 items in a typical week, and one Friday we tasted more than 500 new products between 10 a.m. and midnight. By 2019, we counted it up. We had tasted more than 30,000 products and had sold only about 7,000 of them. Non-food goes through the same gate at a slower speed. Cosmetics go home with MDs for around two weeks of real use before they can even reach the committee, and appliances get the same treatment.
Taste is only the entry ticket. Each category carries a written standard for what good must mean there, around 70 criteria for meat and more than 90 for a children’s cereal – the most demanding standard we keep. Our MDs visit the production site for essentially everything we sell, and researching one product takes months at minimum. We once spent a full year evaluating a dairy product before launching it. The standard exists so that if a customer ever asks on what basis we manage products, we can open the book and show them. Price follows the same discipline. An expensive product must have a reason to be expensive and a cheap one a reason to be cheap, and our MDs analyze cost down to the price per kilo of the pork, the marinade, the processing fee, and the packaging.
The committee is also where the hardest calls get made, because in our decisions, customer satisfaction outranks revenue, always. Apples had several bad harvests running, and prices soared. We debated between selling a very expensive apple and lowering the spec for a cheaper one and concluded that a set of four or five apples at 50,000 won (about 35 US dollars) and a set of five at 15,000 won (about 10 US dollars) were both apples we could never call good for the customer. So we gave up the category’s revenue and halted apple sales for the season.
The same discipline governs how long anything stays on sale. A blueberry is a premium, same-day fruit, and the MD who runs it must ask every single day whether keeping it on sale one more day is genuinely good for the customer, knowing that selling this way guarantees forecasting misses, disposal, and lost revenue. Most retailers are unable to operate this way because the economics are too punishing. When Kurly declines to sell something, the reason is that the customer would walk away unsatisfied.
You have called Kurly a high-tech IT company that runs a retail business. What does that mean in practice?
It means data carries the model. We buy most of what we sell, so a bad demand forecast turns straight into waste, and waste connects directly to survival for a company like ours. From the very beginning, we regarded data capability as an asset and invested more in it than in anything else.
Our sales and logistics forecasting system is named Demung-i, which means the puppy that fetches data, and it’s a name we chose deliberately so that everyone in the company, whatever their role, would find data friendly. It runs algorithms and machine learning over our sales history to forecast demand across tens of thousands of products, each with its own lead time, from a week for the Jeju hairtail to a year for the panettone. New hires start with data handling and analysis training, because every decision here rides on data. Nobody on our founding team had deep retail experience. I once thought of that as a handicap, and it turned out to be a great advantage, because we reasoned from the customer and the data.
The machinery digests on the order of a billion data points a day. The numbers get crunched overnight and arranged on a dashboard for the next morning. We call it a 24-hour cycle, so when we miss our numbers, we know what to do. Our pre-sold, one-day-life products, ordered from the producer in advance, picked in the morning, sold that night, and gone by design, now number around 3,000 items, and even selling that way our disposal rate has held around one percent. Every additional day of data makes the structure work better.
The other half of the loop is the customer’s voice, kept raw. I read customer feedback exactly as customers wrote it, every entry, starting with the harshest. My day begins between six and seven in the morning with the worst reviews of the night, weekends included, and my husband complains that his is the only feedback I decline to read. Somewhere along the way I became grateful to angry customers, because a person who was upset could simply leave without a word, and instead they told us, which means we can fix one thing and then one more. It’s why daily achievement sits first among the qualities we hire for. Improve today over yesterday, even slightly, every day.
Some things no technology catches. When a customer wrote that our gomtang (beef soup) tasted different, we secret-shopped our own product, ordering it like a customer and eating it like a customer. No machine tastes food for you yet, so that work stays ours. Food is a difficult business for exactly this reason, and the way through it is diligent, continuous improvement.
Producers sit at the center of how you describe Kurly. What changes for a producer who joins you, and how does sustainability fit in?
The structure changes first. Because we commit quantities in advance and buy outright, the producer’s single biggest anxiety about inventory disappears, and they can pour everything into making. Around that, we take on the jobs that are hardest for a small producer to do alone. Risk and quality consulting, marketing, brand exposure inside Kurly, and joint product planning. When a good product comes out of that work, we buy it outright too.
The results are the numbers I am proudest of. As of 2025, small producers and small businesses accounted for over 67 percent of everything we purchased, against 33 percent from conglomerate affiliates, and our major suppliers’ sales through Kurly are growing every year.
My favorite example is our kale farmer, who has been with us since the very first month. He is an organic grower of 30 years who sold 20 or 30 bags a day when we met, and he now sells around 800. He reads his customer reviews to feel connected to the people eating what he grows, and says the thing he values most is that he can focus on farming.
People sit inside the same commitment. Dawn-hour delivery work existed long before Kurly. Someone has always picked up cabbage at midnight at the country’s southern tip and driven it through the night so that school lunches are cooked and markets open on time. The workers doing that were paid by the day, so when the work existed, they were paid and when it disappeared, they went unpaid, and their deepest wish was a stable job with something like a monthly wage. We interviewed those workers before launch. We needed night delivery anyway, so we became the first in the industry to pay delivery managers a fixed salary, and in the early days, at our volumes, we took real losses doing it. Managers with stable pay carry real responsibility, which is exactly why we call them managers. Our job as a company is to treat them rationally and make sure they earn well, incentives included.
We also use the reach of online retail to grow value-driven categories that offline shelves could never carry, because online pools the whole country’s demand for a value in one place. We are among the country’s biggest sellers of animal-welfare milk, and our vegan kimbap has become a product we make a million of every month. It is frozen, made entirely with Korean ingredients, and warm in about two and a half minutes.
What is Kurly like as a place to work, and what does leading it ask of you?
Kurly is a company that runs a marathon with real diligence, and there isn’t even a finish line. We run hard every day anyway. It is part of why my heart aches for our people, because we are a company with no gold medal, no first place, no hundred-point score. A day when the voice of the customer reads zero, a day when every single Kurly customer is happy, cannot exist. The customer will forever have something to tell us, and accepting that while still running hard is difficult work. We set revenue targets like any business, and when reaching a number would require sacrificing the value we hold first, we decline the number. Kurly-ness, to me, is holding on to the most important thing precisely when it is hardest to hold.
My own role keeps moving to wherever the company is weakest. Wartime and peacetime ask for different commanders. In the founding years, everything was wartime and I ran a small team’s daily survival. Today each organization has its own leaders and a stable decision structure, so I go looking for the next battlefield, doing the zero-to-one or finding the problem.
When we hire leaders, my first principle is to hire people who make me uncomfortable. Same direction, different disposition. If someone’s instincts matched mine, I could simply decide alone, and the value is the different lens. When something unforeseeable hits, the combination of those views is usually the right answer, and my job is to synthesize them into an action plan. I describe myself as a COO-type CEO.
My self-confidence runs low, and my self-respect runs high, and the combination turns out to be useful, because it makes me prepare relentlessly. People here say that I work like a junior manager, and they’re right. Asking my team to walk into a dangerous field I had not personally prepared for would feel like abandoning my post.
Which stretch of that marathon has been hardest, and how do you keep yourself steady?
The hardest stretch surprises people. It was COVID. A common assumption is that those years were good to Kurly. For me, they were the most challenging. Demand and headcount expanded at a pace we had never planned for, and the cycle that allows a company to stay healthy, hire good people, work according to its values, reward results properly, and reinvest those gains in further growth buckled under the strain. I hate the expression ‘churning through work,’ but that period was truly a churning-through-work mode, moving forward and deeply uncomfortable the whole way.
Around the middle of 2023, once the pandemic had clearly passed, we did a company-wide reset. We re-examined the asset portfolio and the organization, re-tuned how we work, and stripped out the things we would never have done had COVID not existed. That work continues, and happily we are largely back on the road Kurly originally set out to travel. The lesson I keep is that every business takes its full time to reach orbit. Even when a stretch looks compressed and effortless, it never is. Patience is mandatory, and doubly so when many people are involved. Eleven years of every possible incident have trained me to meet whatever happens with the thought that this, too, shall pass.
Leading the company starts with leading myself. The question I ask most often is the one I ask every morning. Am I in good condition today, and how prepared am I? I believe the body governs the mind, because when I am unwell, my focus goes and the work goes with it, so each morning I score my condition and use my routines to pull it above 80 out of 100. Before sleep, I separate what I can solve from what I cannot and erase the unsolvable before my head touches the pillow. When I truly hit a wall, I go shopping on Kurly, and the thought that if I quit I’ll never get to eat all of this snaps me right awake. My favorite hour of the day is still 11 a.m., when the new products launch.
What advice do you give founders today?
First, on whether to start at all. If the reason is wanting to make money, or thinking it will be fun, I would talk you out of it. A rising valuation puts no actual cash in your hands, so money makes poor fuel for the long haul, and expecting fun is naive, because people in the middle of a startup spend every single day lifting a business that is on fire back onto its feet. Do it when you feel you would regret it at the moment of your death. Without that conviction, the daily perseverance a startup demands sits close to impossible.
Second, dream big but act small. Great visions get reached through the small innovations and solutions you produce every day. My own day starts with the most critical customer voices, and if by evening we have improved even one thing customers struggled with, I have moved a step closer to what I have been dreaming of. Focus on solving real problems, because that is the only way to achieve a vision one day.
My parents instilled the habit into me as a child, one line a day. What could I have done better today, and what will I do better tomorrow? Start at 1, end the day at 1.01, and daily one-percent improvements compound until, at some inflection point, the curve turns exponential. I have told our team since the earliest days that this business is the old craftsman carving his wooden bat. Today’s bat looks identical to yesterday’s. Pick it up after two years of daily carving and you know instantly it’s a different object.
Third, and this was my own question long before it became advice, ask what problem is most important to you. Ahead of whether it will make money and whether it will be meaningful, what matters is that the problem is genuinely yours. Our parents’ generation could work to retirement and find both a living and a sense of purpose in one workplace. Watching that rule loosen for my generation, my conclusion was to go and solve the problem that mattered most to me. Define it, solve it a little at a time, and you get better. The person next to you gets better. Keep going long enough, and I believe the world changes too.
Kurly turned 11 in 2026. What do you want it to become from here?
A brand that customers truly love. Loving a brand is a high bar. The customer has to feel that most of what the brand does is right, that it understands their heart, that they genuinely need it. There is a Korean saying about trusting someone so completely that even if they told you soybean paste could be made from red beans, you would take them at their word. That is where I want to take Kurly. The value we have to leave behind is the feeling that for a life of eating well and living well, Kurly is essential.
Becoming number one in Korean e-commerce has never once been our vision or our goal. And in the end, whether people shop on Kurly or somewhere else entirely, I want more people to live healthy, happy lives.
The company should also be built to outlast me. I dislike being cast as the reason Kurly works, as though it would fail without me. A company should live longer than its founder’s life.
Speaking plainly, I could take a month’s vacation and nothing at Kurly would go wrong, because this company is full of excellent people, decisions are mostly made jointly, and the board is very good. Whoever sits in this seat must keep the same promise: the same value to customers, and a long curve of growth, communicated to the market continuously. I keep an emergency plan so that Kurly would carry on unchanged even if something suddenly happened to me, and I try to keep the Kurly of day one as our permanent rival, so the founding spirit stays close.
For myself, the wish is simple. I want to be in good enough health to still sit in the product selection committee, because building this service with my own hands is what I love and I want to keep the energy for it. I have eaten so much food over the years that I carry a touch of gastritis. When I picture the far end, my personal mission is that on the day I die, Kurly remains the most impressive brand I have ever seen.
A life feels successful to me if, at the end, you can say that you tried everything you wanted to try and learned a great deal along the way. During my time at Kurly, the balance I seek in life has come together better than I could’ve hoped: the basics are covered, I have a good community around me, I continue to change and grow, and I get to do work that carries real meaning. That’s exactly why this job stays so much fun.