Dreaming in colour: how South Korea’s Chang Sung-sook realised a new corporate vision
- With little more than a high school diploma and a bold ambition, Chang has spent four decades building a company in the opaque world of industrial pigments
- Getting there meant mixing a new relationship between supplier and client
South Korean businesswoman Chang Sung-sook had an unlikely start in the world of industrial colourants.
The 19-year-old high school graduate embarked on her career in a male-dominated workforce in South Korea in the 1970s, working in an accounting department in a local pigment company with no knowledge or background in chemistry.
“[As a] female employee at that time, the chemistry industry had a very high barrier for women, and it also had a high barrier for people who were not majoring in chemistry,” she said.
More than four decades later, Chang is the founder and chief executive of Wooshin Pigment, making colourants for everything from cars to cosmetics, and with ambitions to expand throughout Southeast Asia.
To get there, Chang started from the ground up. She would arrive at the office an hour early to clean up leftover granular pigments on the office floor. The task ultimately gave her an edge in understanding the product.
“After I cleaned up, I found the nature of the pigment materials. I came to touch the pink, red, orange and all the various colours of the pigment products,” she said. “And I found that some are solvent in oil, others are solvent in detergent, and others are solvent in water.”