LG's Lucky Cream Origins: Plastic Jars, GoldStar Radios and the LG Rebrand

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Today's LG Corporation employs more than 220,000 people with subsidiaries in over 80 countries, but it began in January 1947, when Koo In-hwoi founded the Lak Hui Chemical Industrial Corporation, pronounced Lucky, in South Korea. Its first hit was Lucky Cream, the first domestically produced Korean makeup cream. In war-damaged early 1950s Korea, the cream's fragile, heavy and expensive glass jars kept breaking on rough roads, so in 1952 the company became the first in South Korea to enter plastics manufacturing. Once it had molding machines, it also turned out combs, soap dishes and toothbrushes.

In 1958 the family set up GoldStar, which produced South Korea's first domestic radio, and for decades Lucky handled household goods such as Lucky and Perio toothpaste while GoldStar sold electronics under a separate brand. After Koo In-hwoi died in 1969 his son Koo Cha-kyung led the company, and the two sides merged as Lucky-Goldstar in 1983. In 1995 grandson Koo Bon-moo rebranded the whole group as LG with the Life's Good tagline. In 2008 LG commissioned a seven-note sound logo from Walter Werzowa, the composer behind Intel's chime, based on the English folk tune The Lincolnshire Poacher. LG AI Research launched in December 2021, while succession still follows a male-heir tradition.

• Lucky and GoldStar were kept as separate brands so a soap logo would not undercut the prestige of an expensive radio.
• The episode compares the plastics pivot to Levi Strauss selling denim to gold rush miners rather than digging for gold.
• In 2023 LG announced it had cut AI inference costs by nearly 78 percent through better memory efficiency.
• After his son died in 1994, Koo Bon-moo legally adopted his nephew Koo Kwang-mo in 2004 to secure a male successor, who became chairman in 2018.
• The Koo family holds nearly 46 percent of the holding company, which the episode argues lets LG make long-term research bets.