Hyungseok Dino Ha is Founder and CEO of MEMEBOX Corp. Founded in 2012, Memebox is a global K-Beauty brand incubator, leveraging the latest innovations of K-Beauty and data-driven product development, powered by a community of five million monthly beauty enthusiasts. Based in San Francisco with five outposts across the world, including South Korea, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, Memebox is bringing the agility of the K-Beauty craze to an international audience.

 

In college, Dino studied Environmental Engineering before joining the Army as a trooper. He was voluntarily deployed to Afghanistan to work with over 20 coalition forces, whereby he made a meaningful American relationship that pushed him to move to New York City once he completed his service. In New York City, Dino pursued a career in fashion and attended Parsons School of Design. He then joined the Tom Ford team to work in their public relations department. Following, Dino joined Tmon (e-commerce) and led new business development & sales until their acquisition by LivingSocial (later Groupon) for $300M.

 

His experience, both in fashion and the start-up tech space, inspired Dino to start his own entrepreneurship journey. Combining his passion for engineering and background in fashion, Dino sought to build a tech-driven beauty company fueled by customer-centric data. With Korea being the most competitive beauty market, with thousands of new brands launching each year, Dino saw an opportunity to leverage proprietary data to drive brand success in a hyper-competitive market.

 

Memebox first launched as an e-commerce platform to discover K-Beauty with an opt-in subscription service. Memebox still operates its marketplace in Korea and has more than 4,500 brands. It’s a mobile driven platform with more than 97% transactions on mobile native app.

 

In 2014, Dino saw the white-space opportunity to create in-house labels rooted in K-Beauty innovation for the U.S. consumer. While Memebox continues to pull their latest data from operating a mobile platform in Korea, there is a great opportunity to bring K-Beauty to the global market. Today, Memebox has introduced brands currently available in Asia, the United States and online, including I Dew Care in partnership with Ulta, Nooni, Pony Effect, I’M MEME, and the first K-Beauty color brand exclusive to Sephora, Kaja.