Busan Daily – Hi! Our Brand: Angel Juicer

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2014-10-27

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Busan Daily – Hi! Our Brand: Angel Juicer

"Hardships many times over...surged back up in exports”

Once they have a national reputation large enough for everyone to know their names, and then this local brand comes back all the way from the bottom. This brand is famous for the juicer. Angel Juicer’s Jeom Doo Lee Kim (60) tells his story dotted with hardships and suffering from his factory in Sinpyeong-dong, Busan.

It was in 1984 that Angel Green juice was born. The press factory, which was operated with her husband Lee, Moon Hyeon (65), was closed due to financial difficulties. As a result, she had suffered from angina and neurological diseases.

When I tried to relieve the symptoms only by medication, I had the strange experience of being cured in six months with the help of a natural healer. As the mixer used in this process broke down from time to time, my husband began to make juice by taking advantage of his experience in operating a press factory.

Monthly sales rose to five billion
Stainless steel product development, overseas market development
While making a living by working in a used bookstore, Kim finally succeeded in making a machine that effectively cut the leaf of a vegetable without trouble after suffering through the trial and error process for nearly four years.

At the time when the juice could not be squeezed, it was priced at 380,000 won, which was quite expensive.

Two years later, Kim and her husband finally built a machine with the ability to extract juice and put it on the market.

From then, she introduced Gil Yong-woo and Yang Mi-kyung, which were less popular in the day, and they made a TV ad with a concept of vegetable juice that protects the liver after drinking alcohol, and it was a hit.

The monthly sales of juicers, which were sold fifty times a month, increased more than double. In 1991, monthly sales amounted to five billion won.

They say clouds always follow the sunshine, right? In the process, there was a patent dispute with other companies, and suddenly sales fell sharply as the news of a leak of metal powder came out in 1994. It was judged harmless after the reexamination of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, but it was not enough to prevent a money crunch. Kim and her husband eventually went bankrupt and went to the US.

Spending their difficult days in the US, the president and her husband volunteered to squeeze fruit juice and vegetable juice for arthritis and diabetes patients. In the process, many people got courage while seeing the efficacy, and Kim and her husband returned to Korea a year later.

The couple, who started from the bottom, succeeded in developing a new product that introduced a stainless-steel casting method in three years.
In order to secure a product line, they turned their attention to overseas markets rather than the domestic market, where memories of a leak still remained.

As they posted product descriptions on the internet and waited, buyers' reactions came from Russia, the US, Germany and the UK. Buyers who thought it was more reliable and squeezed more juice than other products bought Angel Juicers, which cost one-million won per unit, as a premium juicer. Of the total sales of 3.6 billion won per year, the proportion of exports is 97%, so Angel Juicers are gaining popularity overseas.

Kim said, "As I gained confidence in securing a certain amount of the overseas market, I am now trying to knock on the door of the domestic market again."

For this, Angel Juicer plans to develop popularized products with a retail price of 500,000 won next year, put them on the market, and sell them through home shopping.

 

nurumi@busan.com
Reporter: Lee, Sang Yoon