Not the paperwork kind. The other kind — the one who’s lived here long enough to have opinions about cheese and still gets asked where she’s really from.
I spent thirty years in international luxury beauty marketing. The L’Oréal ecosystem, mostly. Seoul, Paris, and a great deal of airport. I sat in the rooms where global brands decided what Asia wanted. Sometimes they were right.
The other times are why this site exists.
What Gangnam Rive Gauche is
Gangnam is where Korean money learned to perform.
Rive Gauche is where French money learned to pretend it doesn’t.
I live between those two addresses. This is what the view looks like.
I write about brand crises, corporate culture failures, diversity theatre, and the specific way multinational companies humiliate themselves the moment they cross a border they didn’t bother to read about first. Korea, Asia, France, Europe. Tech, luxury, beauty, and the people who run them.
Every article is built the same way. What happened. What it cost — in actual numbers, with sources. And how it got through an approval chain staffed entirely by adults.
That last part is usually the story.
Why an outsider
There are two useful positions in this business and almost nobody holds both.
Insiders understand the machinery. They don’t notice the strangeness — they’ve stopped seeing it. Outsiders notice everything and understand nothing; they write the think pieces that make practitioners laugh.
I was inside for three decades. I’m still foreign. It’s an exhausting way to live and an excellent way to see.
When a global brand does something in Korea that makes an entire country close its account, I can tell you what the meeting looked like and why nobody in it flinched. That’s the whole product.
What you won’t find here
Thought leadership. Frameworks with four quadrants. The word “journey.”
I don’t do outrage either. Outrage is cheap and it ages badly. Irony holds up better, and the numbers do most of the work anyway.
The rules I write by
- Real data, real sources, real figures. Never “a significant decline.” Always 26.3% in seven days.
- Names are fictional when the crisis isn’t public yet. Real when the whole country already knows.
- No article ends by asking what you think. It ends by asking what you’d have approved.
Where the rest lives
LinkedIn — the publication page. Full articles, first.
Substack — the newsletter. Longer, more personal, and the version I couldn’t publish on LinkedIn.
Subscribe there if you want the parts that didn’t survive the professional frame.
Or stay here. This is home base — everything ends up on this site eventually, with the cross-links and the receipts.
I’m Jin. Korean alien living in France, watching both sides of the mirror.
Thanks for reading.
Thirty years in luxury beauty marketing. Korean, living in France. I write about brand crises, corporate failure, and what borders do to companies.