Clay rebrand 1963 ceramics house Kwangjuyo around its founding kiln

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.