About Objet Seoul
Objet Seoul is a curated Korean wholesale source built by a US retailer who imports from Korea. Our story, how we work, and why we started.
We started as a shop, not a supplier.
Objet Seoul didn't begin as a wholesale company. It began with a retail store — Litko Giftshop — where roughly 90% of what we sold came from Korea.
The work started in January 2024, preparing to open Litko. By that June, our founder Jae was on the ground in Korea, China, and Vietnam, trying to source brands and find suppliers and distributors in person. It was harder than it looked from the outside — reaching the companies and brands worth carrying meant cold outreach across a language barrier, slow responses, and a lot of doors that simply didn't open.
It took persistence. Jae reached out to more than 50 brands before establishing real connections with 10 of them by January 2025 — the brands that would go on to fill the store when Litko opened its doors later that year.
Two things became obvious along the way. First, customers loved these products. Korean stationery, ceramics, candles, and home goods sold in a way that made the store feel genuinely curated. Second, almost no other US shop could get them. The brands we'd worked so hard to reach had no English-facing wholesale channels, set minimums sized for Korean distributors, and were genuinely difficult to connect with.
We'd already done the hard part — the travel, the outreach, the vetting, the importing, the customs. So we built Objet Seoul to open that door for other shops, without the year of groundwork it took us.
What we actually learned importing from Korea
This isn't a drop-shipping operation run from a spreadsheet. Everything we offer, we learned by doing it for our own store.
We learned that the best Korean brands often don't want to talk to a small US retailer. One of the first brands we approached — a lighting company whose lamps we used as fixtures in our own shop — required a $60,000 annual minimum before they'd accept any order at all. Customers asked to buy those lamps constantly. The brand wouldn't budge. That's the wall most small retailers hit, and it's why so many give up on sourcing Korean products directly.
We learned that each category imports differently — that dinnerware faces food-safety rules, candles ship as hazmat, textiles need specific labeling — the kind of detail you only absorb by clearing customs yourself, not by reading about it.
And we learned that what a boutique actually needs isn't a single brand at high volume. It's a curated mix across many brands, in quantities a small shop can afford. That insight is the entire model behind Objet Seoul.
How Objet Seoul works
We're a curated Korean wholesale source built specifically for US boutiques and gift shops — focused on the lifestyle side of Korean design that the beauty-focused wholesalers don't serve:
- Vetted brands, real relationships. Every brand we carry is one we've sourced and verified ourselves.
- A curated mix in one order. Buy across many brands under one achievable minimum, instead of meeting each brand's minimum separately. (Why this matters for small shops.)
- Logistics handled. The importing, customs, and shipping complexity is ours, not yours.
- Lifestyle, not beauty. Stationery, home, decor, tableware, candles, and gifts — the categories most Korean wholesale suppliers skip.
Who this is for
Objet Seoul is built for the independent shop owner — the boutique, the gift shop, the lifestyle store — who wants a Korean section that feels genuinely curated and that customers can't find everywhere else. If you've ever wanted to carry Korean products but couldn't crack the sourcing, that's precisely the problem we exist to solve. (Here's the full picture of how importing actually works.)
Let's work together
We're a real shop, run by real people who import from Korea every day. If that's the kind of partner you want for your Korean section, we'd love to hear from you.
Founder
Jae founded Objet Seoul after building Litko Giftshop, where importing from Korea became the heart of the business. The journey began in January 2024 and led across Korea, China, and Vietnam in search of the right brands — over 50 reached out to, 10 brought home, and a retail store opened in 2025 on the back of those relationships. Objet Seoul exists to give other US shops access to those brands without the year of groundwork it took to build them.