Clay rebrand 1963 ceramics house Kwangjuyo around its founding kiln

The Brand Identity: Kwangjuyo has stood as the standard-bearer of Korean ceramics since 1963, when it set out to revive the severed lineage of the royal kilns that served the Joseon Dynasty. Now, the brand carries that heritage into homes and onto tables far beyond Korea, and it came to Seoul and New York-based creative consultancy Clay for a rebrand built for that wider reach. The Sugwang-ri oreumgama, the climbing kiln that marks the brand’s origin point, became the source from which the identity grew. Built in 1949 and reconstructed in 1962 into a 12-chamber stepped structure, it raises the temperature with each ascending chamber.

Generations of artisans grew into master craftspeople within its walls. Its stacked, chamber-by-chamber form holds both the accumulated time of Korean ceramic culture and the technical mastery of the people who worked it. Clay embedded that structure directly into the brand’s Hangul logotype, which meant first deciding what role Hangul should play in the identity at all. The mark Clay inherited paired a Chinese-character seal, used by the founding chairman, with an English logotype.

The brand had long recognised the limits of that combination – the seal lacked legibility and did not carry enough symbolic weight for a brand representing Korea on the global stage. Clay revisited the pairing from the starting point of the logo design and chose Hangul, the alphabet unique to Korea, as the identity’s primary mark. Giving Hangul such significance on a project aimed at international markets was a bold call, but the studio judged it as the one approach that could secure scarcity and symbolic power at the same time.

A recognisably Korean identity in place of a neutral one. With Hangul established as the brand’s core direction, Clay set about giving the letterforms a structure rooted in the brand’s history. The translation from kiln to letterform embraced a trait that’s specific to how the script works. Each Hangul character is a self-contained syllabic block, an initial consonant, a middle vowel and an optional final consonant compressed into one unit, and the full set runs past 11,000 combinations. “Designing Korean lettering is inevitably an exercise in coincidence, in embracing what a given word happens to offer you,” the studio explains.

Across all three characters in 광주요 (Kwangjuyo), the middle vowel falls on the horizontal axis, creating an architectural datum that runs straight through the wordmark. The ascending horizontal strokes drawn from that axis trace the silhouette of the climbing kiln, and they read at the same time as a gesture of accumulation, a culture built up layer by layer. Alongside the Hangul mark sits a Latin logotype drawn from Kwangjuyo’s first signage, which reads ‘KWANG JOO KILN / CERAMIC ART’ in condensed all-caps lettering, its optical centre raised slightly to give the type a gentle upward tension.

Those letters had most likely been drawn by hand by a Korean signmaker and rendered as an image rather than type, which gave them a quality that reads as distinctly foreign to an English-speaking eye. Clay carried that character forward, keeping the new Latin logotype functional and close to the spirit of signage lettering. For the bilingual text system, the studio paired DIN 2014 for English with Hallym Gothic for Korean. DIN 2014’s condensed, utilitarian structure echoes the lettering on the original signage, and its industrial roots suited Kwangjuyo’s role as a platform connecting artisans to the market.

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The rebranding of Kwangjuyo highlights significant cultural and strategic elements that can influence brand identity in the global market, making it impactful and relevant for brand strategy professionals, while the emphasis on Hangul adds a novel twist to traditional branding practices.