Now it’s time to take a close look at a small, but competitive business making a difference for the Korean economy. This week’s spotlight is on PPC World Korea, a maker of premium stuffed toys.

One of the engines that powered Korea’s amazing economic growth in the 1960s and 70s was the labor-intensive toy industry. Korea’s toy makers helped make the nation a world-leading stuffed toy manufacturer in the 1980s. However, the industry has since started to decline due to high labor costs. But a small enterprise, PPC World Korea, known for its upscale stuffed toys, is showing new hope to Korea’s stuffed toy industry. Here’s its CEO Kim Gap-yeon김갑연 to tell us more about the company.

The company was established on July 1st, 1999 and it makes stuffed toys. The company name PPC is an acronym of “popular, plush, and coordinate.” “Popular” indicates that we appeal to the masses, “plush” is another word for stuffed toys, and “coordinate” means we can coordinate all the aspects associated with plush toys. We turn all animals into stuffed dolls, even Tin Man from “The Wizard of Oz.” We can make just about anything into a stuffed toy.

Ms. Kim Gap-yeon is a master toymaker who worked in the stuffed toy business even before launching PPC World Korea. She creates high-quality and safe toys for children that help make childhood memories even more special. She travels all around the globe to attend trade shows, where he gains new ideas and new material. Thanks to her efforts, PPC World Korea can make customized stuffed toys. PPC World Korea is confident about its competitiveness in the plush toy industry.



Workers at PPC World Korea are very skilled. Characters are illustrated first, but we don’t do character drawings. We just say “Let’s make this” and voila, we have a doll. Then we go through alterations and add finishing touches before rolling out the final version. We only have the bare minimum labor force. We have one designer, one fabric cutter, one sewing machine operator, one finisher, etc. But they’re all experts with more than 20 years of experience in each field. Their experience makes them faster, neater, and better in everything they do. They are exceptional in both speed and technique.

PPC World Korea is staffed by skilled specialists with just as much experience and know-how as its CEO Kim Gap-yeon. The firm is capable of making customized dolls and has made many of the mascots for Korean companies. PPC World Korea created plush toys for Cheong Wa Dae’s Butterfly of Hope icon, the Good Oil character for S-Oil and a large-scale tiger for a dried persimmon theme park in Sangju, North Gyeongsang Province. The company has even made dolls based on the drawings of kindergarten children. PPC World Korea is recognized all over the world for its ability to turn any imagination into something warm and cuddly.

We have a lineup of products called the Lovely Series featuring seven animals. Each one of those animals is really soft and huggable, and can be arranged in several poses, even a slouching one. I designed these animals 15 years ago, when the general trend was to fill the dolls with cotton. But I was the first one to introduce the concept of soft, drooping dolls. When I first developed this doll, a Belgian buyer called me and asked me not to display the doll in public. She ended up buying 1.5 million dollars’ worth of our dolls that year.



Having made the world’s first fluffy, huggable stuffed toys, PPC World Korea is now exporting its products to ten countries around the World. It has passed Europe’s tough toy safety standards of EN71 and other safety and environmental tests in various export markets. That’s why PPC World Korea is the pride of the Korean stuffed toy industry. Riding the momentum, the company opened an online shopping mall named Toy TaleZ in 2013 to make its wonderful toys and dolls available to more children.

Our future goal is to become a global design specialist. Recently, direct purchases have grown popular in Korea. People can buy anything they want from anywhere in the world. So I want to set up a direct purchase system that allows people from all around the globe to buy our toys. When our company grows even bigger, I want to build a factory and staff it with experienced workers in their 50s. They received their toy-making training when Korea’s toy business was booming. They’re experienced and skilled, but they need money, so I’m going to hire them for my factory. Then people around the world can purchase high-quality toys made in Korea by these skillful toymakers. That’s my dream.

PPC World Korea hopes to recreate the glory days of the 20th century when Korea dominated the world’s stuffed toy market. The company is hoping to bring innovation and change to the waning plush toy industry, so that the entire toy industry can thrive once again.