The Hyundai Department StoreA GEM OF AN APP

In Korea, shopping centers are daily life. They host events, family weekends, first dates, lunch breaks. The Hyundai is one of the country's most renowned retail destinations. Its Seoul flagship broke national sales records within three years of opening, proving that a department store could function as a cultural hub: food halls, pop-ups, daycare, exhibitions; the kind of place you visit without needing to buy anything.

Korean e-commerce runs on speed, price, and mobile. Two-hour delivery, comparison engines, infinite search racing to the bottom. Premium retail doing e-com risked being flattened by a logistics game it could not win. The Hyundai needed a platform that carried its signature into the phone: hospitality, curation, the small pleasure of finding something you did not know you wanted. And underneath it, a larger ambition: rewrite what a premium retail department store can be when its competitors are no longer other department stores, but feeds, content platforms, and entire economies of attention.

It started with a name. HiHi: a greeting twice over, hospitality made audible, a slogan and a personality in two syllables. Warm, lighthearted, generous. Ten years after BaseNYC named and shaped The Hyundai itself, the same team returned to extend the brand into digital, leading naming, brand and digital strategy, identity, art direction, design, and UI/UX for The Hyundai Hi. The result: a new floor of the same building, open at all hours, sitting in your pocket.

The wrong instinct was search and compare. Our answer: discover, collect, share. At the center sits the gem: a tactile, glossy icon that users collect as they browse three thousand brands organized as shop-in-shops and curated rooms. Tagging a product becomes an act of self-expression. Gems shape the feed, surface finds, and turn private taste into a public, shareable layer. A roster of tastemakers and cultural figures brings curation into conversation. A Me Space lets users build a room of their own.

The proof of the system is what the client did with it. The Hyundai Hi's internal team picked up the language and ran: ad campaigns built around real gem collections, live video streams hosted inside the app, editorial features, and Kill It, a stylists' survival show currently airing on national television. A brand world generative enough to be lived in, not just looked at. Seven hundred thousand users in the first month, against a category obsessed with price and speed. Less shopping app, more shopping feeling. Open, collaborative, conversational. Say Hi to HiHi.