SEOUL: Early starts to workdays and late finishes are routine in South Korea, a country notorious for its hard-driving corporate culture, but Erin Lim knew she wanted to do things differently at

her business.

The 38-year-old entrepreneur pioneered office-free work to help working mums like her in 2017 — well before work-from-home flexibility became a happy side effect of the pandemic, including for many parents.

After the birth of her first son, Lim, who describes herself as an “overwhelmingly picky customer”, could not find a baby carrier she liked. So, with her six-month-old son in tow, she headed to Seoul’s main fabric market.

Soon, she had a prototype of the baby wrap she wanted and, despite having no manufacturing or entrepreneurial experience, launched a business making and selling the carriers out of her front room.

“I’m a person who doesn’t take anything for granted. So, for example, when I started the company, I asked myself: why would I need an office?” Now, Lim’s company has 55 staff members — 92 per cent women, the majority working parents — and they all still work almost exclusively from home, offering flexible hours and keeping in-person meetings to the bare minimum.

“The reason: I wanted to watch my children grow up,” Lim said, adding that family life should take priority over a rigid, inflexible work schedule. The daily school drop-off “is a really essential time — to walk with them to school”, she said. So her company, Konny, enshrined the right to a school drop-off into its

policies. “I didn’t want to have a company culture that didn’t understand that,” she added.

Published in Dawn, December 29th, 2023