Byeong Chul Kim, President of Misung Commercial Co., Ltd.
Chapter 4. Setting up a factory on the African Continent
BNB Magazine has been publishing memoirs in the spirit of learning from the past. This year’s memoir series features President Byeong Chul Kim, Misung Commercial Co., Ltd. Starting as a founding member of Misung in the 70s and spanning five decades, his life in wigs is a colorful story that spans two continents and the history of Korean wigs. Based on the vivid oral histories of President Byeong Chul Kim, here comes a vivid account of his time in Africa.
Workers leaving the NINA factory in Senegal in the 1980s.
First impressions of Africa
The road to Senegal, Africa took almost two days. Since there are no direct flights from Korea to Africa, I had to fly 13 hours to France on Korean Air, spend 10 hours in Paris, and then transfer to a 7-hour Air France flight to Dakar, the capital of Senegal. From the airport, it was another hour and a half drive to Rufisque, where I was going to stay. Arriving in the darkness of the night, the housing felt like a military barracks, with an empty room but a bed, but I fell asleep almost instantly, exhausted from the long journey.
Next morning, I woke up early as is my habit. Out of curiosity, I walked out and saw local children running around in groups, and I realized I was in Africa. I’d heard of it, but I never realized how dark their skin color could be. I, on the other hand, was a novelty to them, so we stared at each other for a while, like a Bushmen discovering a coke bottle for the first time. My first impression of Africa was so powerful that it stuck with me. I remember laughing out loud when the Chairman of Samchully asked about my first impression of Africa when I replied, “In Africa, even kids are very dark skinned.” But there was something else that really surprised me.
Posing with children in Senegal
Factories aren’t there, so you build ground up.
After breakfast of a bowl of café au lait and a baguette, I was on my way to the factory, looking out the car window at the unfamiliar landscapes passing by. I was scared and excited at the same time for the new challenge. I realized that Misung had entered an unknown territory, and I made up my mind again to do well in the unfamiliar environment. The factory site located in an export free zone, or “zone franche” in French, about 20 kilometers from Dakar downtown. To encourage foreign investment, the Senegalese government reduces corporate taxes for tenants in the zone and exempts them from paying taxes on raw materials, vehicles, and fuel imported from abroad.
But when I arrived at Zone Franche, I was stunned. There was “nothing” where we were supposed to build a factory. There was a hectare of empty sandy land with only boundary markers, no buildings, no shade or trees to protect us from the African heat, and we knew our journey to build a running factory would be rough.
The way ahead was dark, but I couldn’t afford to sit back. Prefabricated building modules were being shipped across the ocean in containers, and since we couldn’t raise the building on sandy ground, we had to lay the foundation right away. We spent the whole month working on the ground. Like Sisyphus lifting a boulder, the team worked in the blazing sun to cement the sandy base, pour water, and compact the ground for a month before the building materials were delivered and construction began. Since I and Youngjun Ko, who had no knowledge in architecture, were in charge, we had to struggle for a long time in the process of interpreting the design blueprints, and above all, the construction equipment was all manual, so we had to keep worrying about the safety. The heavy steel bar was raised with a crowbar and pulled up by manual pulleys, and in retrospect, it seems a miracle that the building was assembled without incident. In any case, we worked into the night to make the construction as fast as possible, and we were able to complete the barn in just a month. By October 1983, a small, privately held African company, Venus Industry Inc. stood tall in the Senegalese export zone.
Warehouse factory shortly after the completion
Front yard garden of the factory
Training instruction: “Follow me!”
As soon as the factory began to take shape, or more precisely, as soon as it had a roof over its head and a place to shelter from the sun, we started recruiting employees. We planned to recruit about 50 people in the first round, and when word got out that there was a foreign wig company hiring, locals flocked like a cloud to get jobs. Everyone from family members of the local high-ranking officials to their in-laws’ uncle came with letters of recommendation, and we were quite overwhelmed with the enthusiasm. We had to come up with a selection criteria to eliminate as many people as possible including those who came with a letter of recommendation, but we couldn’t interview them or make them take a test because they spoke a different language, so we came up with a hand skill test.
In simple French, we gave commands like “open your hand, make a fist, fold your fingers, one, two, three, four”… But there were quite a few people who couldn’t even do basic hand gestures because they had been doing rough work like peanut farming. Of those who made it through the screening, the men were assigned to the hackle job, combing hair, and the women to apply bands to tie up the hair. However, the production facility was not yet fully operational and could not be put into production immediately.
First, I needed to find a way to train my employees, and due to the lack of language skills, the easiest way was to make a demonstration and say, “Follow me!” and have them follow along. Inspired by the Saemaul Movement training I received in Korea, I started with an early morning jog. “Follow me, follow me! Un, deux, trois(one, two, three)!” with the chant, we all jogged around the nearly two-kilometer industrial park every morning before work. I then taught the hand gestures by demonstrating them myself. After a while of practicing, the employees gradually became more flexible in their movements and their posture, as they squeezed and unclenched their hands, counted one, two, three, four, and moved fingers like children playing.
Nina’s beginning and the crisis
With the staffing in place and the building completed in October, we immediately began production. And in November, the braid was launched under the Venus Industry’s first brand Nina. After two months in Africa and a lot of hard work, launching the product felt like giving birth to a child.
A vehicle with a Nina billboard
We decided to target the local market first before shipping them abroad and were looking for ways to get the word out about our new brand, and with a limited budget, radio ads were the most effective way to do so. We decided to create a commercial song to introduce Nina products and spread the word locally, and the song was written in the local language, Wolof. French is the official language of Senegal, but the majority of the population speaks Wolof as a first or second language. I asked the production company for “the biggest name in Senegal” as a singer and they recommended Youssou N’Dour, who went on to become Africa’s first global superstar musician and was later appointed to Senegal’s minister of education and culture. Soon, Youssou N’Dour’s “Nina Song” was playing on the radio every lunchtime, and as the locals became more familiar with the name Nina, the market for Nina braids began to grow. Everything was going well.
Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour, who sang the Nina CM song
Later that year, just over a month after the product launched, the news came out of the blue. Nina’s products were banned from the local market. The logic was that the products of the export zone were not intended for domestic use, but for us, it was like being told to go farm in the mountains when we lived next to farmland. We protested that it was against the spirit of the MOU between the presidents of South Korea and Senegal, but they said it was an order from a religious leader.
In the meantime, there was another disconcerting news. The joint venture partner, who had been monitoring the situation, decided to pull out. The African business was facing a crisis.
Continued in the next issue.
