Last night, again, I opened the Musinsa app before falling asleep. Not because there was anything I meant to buy. I pushed the screen up with my thumb, confirmed that a shirt I had put in my cart a few days earlier had come down a little in price, and closed the app. Buying clothes these days mostly works like this. No store, no clerk, no hesitation. But after I closed the app, two strange facts stayed in my head. One: this enormous clothing company hardly makes any clothes at all. Two: the company that actually makes them is one whose name I don't even know, and it is among the biggest of its kind in the world.
So this is a story of two companies wrapped around clothing. The one who sells the clothes, and the one who makes them. And if you look closely at which of the two names the price, an old belief we have carried about the word making begins to wobble a little.
The Clothing Company That Makes No Clothes
What Musinsa does is connect the countless brands that make clothes with the people who want to buy them. Musinsa stands in between, rents out the space, and collects a commission. Call it the gatekeeper of a vast online clothing market. In fact, the largest share of this company's revenue is not money earned selling goods but the commissions it collects from the brands on its platform.
| Musinsa revenue mix (2025) | Share |
|---|
| Commissions (from platform brands) | 38.8% |
| Products (own brands / private label) | 30.8% |
| Merchandise (direct purchase and resale) | 27.3% |
The materials of this wall are traffic, data, and habit. Musinsa began as a sneaker community. A place where people gathered to talk about clothes turned, little by little, into a place that sold them, and the visitors and taste data that piled up along the way became the wall it has now. As with Kakao and Naver before it, the mere fact that people come back without thinking is this company's moat. The habit of opening Musinsa first whenever you want clothes. The habit, like mine last night, of opening it even with nothing to buy.
The wall is young, and already overwhelming. In 2025 Musinsa posted its best results ever: revenue of 1.4679 trillion won, operating profit of 140.5 billion. Transactions through the app reached 5 trillion won. In a year when the fashion economy froze over and the traditional powers all stepped backward together, this company grew by double digits. And interestingly, Musinsa no longer intends to remain a gatekeeper. Its own label, Musinsa Standard, sold 470 billion won worth in a single year. A company that used to broker other people's clothes now makes and sells its own. The gatekeeper has begun setting up its own shop inside the castle.
The Hands That Make the Clothes
Now let us cross to the other side. There is a company called Sae-A Trading. Most people will never have heard the name. Neither had I, before writing this. But this company makes 2.5 million garments a day. In more than forty factories across ten countries. I confess I cannot really picture the number 2.5 million. What I do know is roughly this: if I flip the inside label of the shirt I am wearing, it will carry a place name like Vietnam or Guatemala, and the odds are fairly high that behind that place name stands a company like this one. A good share of the clothes we know by names like Zara, Under Armour, and Abercrombie are, in fact, sewn in this Korean company's factories. Measured purely by the making of clothes, Sae-A Trading is one of the largest companies in the world.
And yet this enormous making hand lacks the thing Musinsa has. The power to name the price. The business called OEM is the work of making clothes to the design a brand has ordered, and delivering them. What they will be made for is, by and large, decided by the one placing the order. Zara sets the price of the clothes; the factory that sewed them does not. Sae-A Trading is the largest hand in the world, and still it cannot name the price of what that hand has made. This is a landscape we will meet again and again in this book. The hands that make, as a rule, do not get to name the price.
That, I suspect, is why. Global Sae-A, the holding company above Sae-A Trading, kept reaching for things other than clothes. It bought a paper company, bought a construction company (Ssangyong E&C), bought a maker of power-plant equipment. Unable to name the price in its own trade, it kept bolting on other businesses that looked as if they could. But the sprawl became a boomerang. The core business, if anything, is coming back to life. Last year Sae-A Trading posted revenue of 2.0245 trillion won on a separate basis, back above the 2-trillion mark for the first time in three years, and operating profit grew to 94 billion. The problem is the group perched on top of it. Having grown its body on debt, the group pays out 158.1 billion won a year in interest alone, and the profit earned sewing clothes barely survives the crossing. Pressed for liquidity, it is currently selling off the paper business it went to such trouble to buy. The company that makes more clothes than anyone in the world is staggering because of everything that isn't clothes.
Who Names the Price
Set the two companies side by side, and you can see where, on this object called clothing, the center of gravity of price has moved.
| Category | Musinsa (the seller) | Sae-A Trading (the making hands) |
|---|
| What it does | Makes no clothes; brokers and curates | Makes 2.5 million garments a day (among world's largest) |
| Power over price | Close to it (sets the commission) | None (the buyer sets the price) |
| 2025 | Record year (operating profit 140.5 billion won) | Core business recovered (separate-basis operating profit 94 billion won) — group interest erodes it |
| What it leans on | Traffic · habit | Factories · skilled hands · cheap labor |
Of course, Musinsa's power over price is not complete either. Musinsa is not the only place that sells clothes online. Coupang sells the same clothes; so do Ably and Zigzag. Raise the commission too far and the brands hang their clothes in the app next door, while consumers switch apps with a few flicks of a finger. Musinsa's descent into manufacturing under its own label may itself be an attempt to fill in these loose doors, even a little. Still, the direction is unmistakable. The power to name the price of clothing has passed from the hands that sew it to the side that displays it and gives it a name.
The Time of the People
The two companies are also opposites in the time of the people inside them.
| Company | Employees | Average annual pay | Average tenure | Revenue per employee | Operating profit per employee |
|---|
| Musinsa | 1,870 | 74.39 million won | 2 years 9 months | approx. 780 million won | approx. 75 million won |
| Sae-A Trading | 718 at the Korean head office
(approx. 50,000–60,000 in overseas production) | Not disclosed | Not disclosed | — | — |
The average Musinsa employee stays less than three years. A young company, a young wall, people moving quickly in and out. The exact opposite of HiteJinro's eighteen years, seen earlier, and shorter even than Kakao's six. In exchange, the money one person turns over in that short time is large. Revenue per head of 780 million won or so; operating profit per head of 75 million. The average salary a person takes home is 74.39 million won, which means the profit they leave behind and the share they carry away lie almost exactly on top of each other — a taut set of scales. And the fact that average pay came down in a single year from 92 million won to the 74-million range is not a story of layoffs; it is dilution, hiring surging faster than the average could hold. The young wall is still drawing people in. Such is the density of a business that keeps a gate.
Sae-A Trading's cells I mostly had no choice but to leave empty. Not because the numbers don't exist, but because the division itself does not hold. The people who sit at the Korean head office taking orders, buying fabric, loading it onto ships: 718. But the people who actually sew those clothes: about 50,000 to 60,000, on the garment lines of Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Vietnam. Behind each person at headquarters, more than seventy hands across the sea. Divide this company's revenue by 718 and you would get a handsome number, but it would be a number that erases the seventy hands. So I decided not to divide. Inside Musinsa's wall, young people who handle data stay briefly; inside Sae-A Trading's wall, the people who actually build the clothes stand close-ranked beyond the border. The same phrase, a clothing company, points to two worlds this different.
A company that makes not a single garment holds the clothing market, and the company that makes more clothes than anyone in the world staggers because of things that aren't clothes. Making something is still enormous and still grueling, but the power to name the price pools not in the hands that make, but at the gateway that sets the thing before the consumer. Whether this inversion is a good thing or not, I have not yet been able to decide. Only, tonight I will probably open the Musinsa app again, and behind a single shirt on the screen, I will no longer quite manage to forget, the way I used to, the seventy hands standing there.
And the very same inversion is under way at the vanity table next door. The story of giants who made cosmetics with their own hands for decades now shaking, while newcomers who never make a single jar of cream take their place. In the next chapter, we watch a castle wall come down.
This piece is part of the "Korea Value Chain" series and is an original work. It is an analysis based on public data and industry sources; some figures and assessments are estimates. It is not intended as a direct basis for investment decisions.
By Alexandro Lee · July 2026
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