How HANARI started

I first visited India while experiencing Indian yoga and preparing for a teaching certification. I have been back three times since.

I did not look at India as a market from the start. As I met the culture and kept returning, I came to feel that Korea and India are as alike in places as they are different. India stopped being a distant, unfamiliar market to me and became somewhere closer to a friend — a place I want to understand better and stay in relationship with.

I am Cho Mi-young, representative of WeBring. Through WeBring I have worked on connecting overseas partners with Korean universities, companies and services, and on helping people who come to Korea find the information they need and settle in. I currently serve as Korea advisor to IIK (Indians in Korea), working on business, education and cultural exchange between the two countries.

Working between two countries taught me one thing I keep coming back to. It is better to understand how the people you are working with actually live and choose, than to decide the answer on one side and carry it over. HANARI started from that.

There was a path where I made a good product in Korea and then took it to India. But I wanted to reverse the order of the question.

Not “how do we sell a Korean product in India?” but “what is a product someone would want to use in everyday life in India?”

So HANARI treats India not as a market to expand into later, but as the first market the product is conceived for. We start from a Korean rice ferment, and then check what texture feels comfortable in hot weather and how it is layered day to day by listening to Indian consumers.

This does not mean we have already finished a product suited to India's climate. HANARI is in development. We are developing it with an OEM in Korea, and the final formula, full ingredient list and any claims about the product will be published only after approval and verification.

The name carries the same wish to connect the two countries. “HAN” holds Korea. “NARI” overlays the image of the Korean lily, nari, with the sound of the Hindi word नारी (nari), meaning woman.

HANARI is a name that carries the brand's direction: it begins in Korea, but it thinks about everyday life in India first. Rather than carrying one country's story to the other in one direction, I want to build this while listening to both.