Bear.Better is a company making cookies, bread and coffee, providing printing service and flower delivery. Founded in 2013 with just five trainees, the company has more than 120 employees now. Just 2 years after its foundation, the company ran a surplus of 1.7 billion won in 2014. It is now the largest company in the related industry and plans to extend its business to café business in 2015. JOH has designed the brand concept and identity of Bear.Better as a form of talent donation: JOH has been providing a general creative directions including package design and space designs from the earlier stages of the company until now.

The two co-representatives of the company are Kim Jeong Ho, a founding member of NHN, who takes charge of outside sales, and Lee Jin Hee who controls inner management of the company. We asked the two representatives about recent updates of the company and the story of the company’s foundation.

Bear.Better is a company that provides employment for those who with autism or other developmental disabilities. In fact, 80% of our employees, except the representatives, the social workers, and so on, are with developmental disabilities. Currently we have four business areas: Printing service for name cards and book-binding, coffee roasting, baking and delivery service of cookies and bread, and flower delivery services for flower baskets and funeral wreaths. Most of our sales are from the trade with other companies, rather than with individual customers. We have about 100 client companies such as Naver, Daelim, IBM, Daum KaKao, eBay, Maeil Dairy, and JOH. All of our client decided to renew the contract with us.

Some of our employees are working at the café inside the Naver building, and a hundred thousand Bear.Better cookies are sold in the Coffee Bean &the Tea Leaf cafes throughout the country in a year. Everyday, employees of NHN entertainment and eBay eats the bread provided by Bear.Better as breakfast. We sold coffee beans for 2.5 million cups of coffee in 2014, and we deliver 12 million won worth of flowers every week. Since we print 5 million pieces of name card, everyone in our country might have at least one name card printed by Bear.Better, we assume.

What these fields have in common is that these are services for which a corporate ought to spend for. Bear.Better focused on the policy of reducing the charge for related employment in association with the ‘Act on Employment Promotion and Vocational Rehabilitation for Disabled Persons.’ It is compelled by law that a private company with more than 50 employees is charged if less than 2.7 percent of total employees are those who are with disabilities. However, if they trade with the standard workplace for people with disabilities, such as Bear.Better, they can have charge reduction up to 50%. Based on that policy, Bear.Better primarily trade with corporate clients, and therefore, the company focuses on the items needed for the corporate’s business.

We have established two major principles: Above all, we wouldn’t want to approach our business as if we need a help since we have disabled employees. We aimed for a fair competition with other company to make our business last. The other principle was to choose items that don’t compete with products made in China. Employees with disabilities have lower productivity, approximately one-fifth, compared to employees without disability. Considering the wages for employees, the productivity would make our products and services hard to compete with Chinese products. Therefore, we focus on jobs that are not likely to be replaced with them.

Those who with developmental disabilities are harder to get employed compared to those who have physical disabilities. The physical disability gives some handicapped doesn’t much affect performances. Speaking of developmental disabilities, however, employees with intellectual disabilities have lower IQs and job performance, and autistic employees are hard to communicate detailed tasks. Therefore, they have very low employment rate: it is assumed that less than 17% of those who have developmental disabilities and less than 1% of autistic people are employed. However, they should have a place to work to have opportunities to play an active role in society. Bear.Better wanted to pay attention to this issue.

Employees with disabilities can work, of course. It’s just that they don’t work at the same intensity, speed and for the same hours with employees without disability. Bear.Better separated a task suitable for one employee without disability into small tasks for four employees with developmental disabilities. We have morning and afternoon shifts who work for four hours a day. We have social workers to assists the tasks and we have recording and monitoring system for every moment of work process. We take every possible measure to ensure safety and prevent any accident from happening. Bear.Better is equipped with safer working facilities for processes which our employees with disabilities deal with themselves.

We also chose tasks accessible to those who have developmental disability. For example, the quality and speed of copying process are not affected even if an employee who pushes the button has a severe disability. That is why we began with printing service. Many people with developmental disability loves to get around the street and have an outstanding skills to memorize subway maps: therefore we assigned them to do delivery services by subway.

We invested a lot into the facilities and instrument to increase our quality of product at the same or higher level of our competitors’. We’ve spent 2.5 billion one for workplace and equipment; we ensured the quality of the product as well as the efficiency of the work thanks to the high-end digital printers and exclusive roasting machines. The processes that directly affect the quality of product, such as roasting the beans, managing recipes for baking or setting up flowers in baskets are done by professionals.

Bear.Better renews contracts every year; thanks to our effort to maintain high quality, we could renew the contract with every corporate clients of ours. However, it’s still hard for us to elaborate our effort in business meetings. We assume that what attract our clients are the branding elements of Bear.Better such as the mascot used in the packages. In fact, they are still attractive even for the clients without any prior knowledge of the company. Instead of telling them that we’re a trustworthy company with better product and equipment, we just present our design which shows the advantages of the company more than words can do.

Even though Bear.Better is a social enterprise for employement of people with disabilities, we didn’t want our company to have a conventional image of warm-hearted and good-natured organization. That was the point of view that JOH had shared with us from the very beginning of the branding project. JOH’s intention for stylish and pleasant design is well reflected in the package design, and we’re very satisfied with it.

Sometimes our clients are surprised by the stylish package design which they never expected from a social enterprise consists of employees with disabilities. I assume that being the social enterprise with an integral brand concept, which is not very common in domestic settings, we’re starting to get rid of their prejudice with Better.Better.

Among the many reasons behind the name, one possible explanation is that ‘bear’ has been a nickname for Kim Jeong Ho who has been donating bread to children in North Korea since 2008 when he had was working for NHN. For 8 years until now, Kim has been providing 3,000 pieces of bread a day: 21 thousand children can have a piece of bread in every week. As his real name is kept a secret in North Korea, the bread is given with his nickname of ‘Uncle Bear.’ Bear is also an image that successfully represent a youthful employee with developmental disability who is innocent as a teddy bear. Then JOH suggested Bear.Better as the company’s name, with an implication of ‘Bear Makes the World Better.’

Frankly speaking, we had worried about the idea of bear mascot before we actually saw it. We hadn’t been so sure whether a cute and lovely teddy bear mascot was a right choice for our company. Unlike what we had expected, however, the bear mascot designed by JOH had a simple, expressionless face that just reminded us of our employees; in reality, what those who have developmental disabilities share in common is this grave and expressionless face. They are stubborn and monotonous. Yet they are trustworthy people who keep their promises. They may be slow in motion but they do their jobs with a naïve honesty. We were glad we had this little expressionless bear as a mascot; if it were just a cute, smiling teddy-bear kind of mascot, we wouldn’t think it fit our company.

Since the beginning of the branding project, JOH have been examining our work environment and thinking about what the sustainable design for our company would be. JOH listened to our hands-on staffs and reflected their opinions in the result. For example, we have to dispose the paper containers to use the newly designed boxes for printed matters. Then JOH made yellow strips with Bear.Better mascot that can be attached to the original paper container when we want to recycle them. The strips save money and effort, make it easier to sort, and give rooms to write down what’s inside the boxes.

We have four different mascots, each doing the tasks for our four different business sector: printing, roasting, baking and delivering flowers. We have separate name cards for each sectors, too. They are helpful especially when we’re on the business meetings: for example, in a meeting related to our flower delivery service, we can casually shows all the different designs of name cards and then change the subject to other business sectors such as coffee and baking. We still use what JOH had designed for us, including packages for copied documents, cookie boxes, business proposal forms and the interior decoration of our offices.

The headquarter office of Bear.Better can be divided into three separate areas: an area for baking, an area for office works and that of printing business. The office area can be used as a learning hall or a rest area from time to time. The moving walls enable the multiple use of a single area. Moreover, the poster frames and other objects with the bear mascots have created a photogenic space which always appears in articles and posts about our company. We didn’t realizes that the visitors would love the decoration when JOH have decided to put those objects in the office area. Also, JOH had put bookshelves on the corner of the office once they have seen how our employees enjoys reading. The bookshelves, filled with books which our employees voluntarily donated, became one of the most loved part of the entire company.

We wish to enlarge our client pool as well as maintaining our existing business sectors. Contracting with a new client makes it possible for us to hire more employees. The employment of a person with disability is a great help for his/her family.

We are planning to launch cafés which people with developmental disability. Like the café we have in the Naver building, we want our cafés to be a part of companies, universities, and public institutions throughout the country. The success of our plan will lead to the employment of people who resides outside Seoul. Just as they have done a great deal in the earlier stages of our company, JOH is going to take care of the design part for our further plans for café. We feel so reassured since JOH is donating their talent for Bear.Better’s new business plan.

The problem of modern society lays in its greed and selfishness: to solve the problem, one has to focus on the essential values. Bear.Better is a company for people with developmental disabilities-therefore, the essential value of our company is to benefit them and then re-invest for our business. We’ll stick to our mission: to make benefit and in turn, to hire more employees with disabilities. We have visitors from many other social enterprises who inquire about our business model, and we open up every related information whenever we’re asked to. In fact, a young person who have just taken a step into the business world, recently visited Bear.Better and then launched one’s own business inspired by our company. We wish there are more companies like us, thus more people with disabilities are getting employed by them.

Tel. +82-2-6267-6919
Fax. 0303-3448-6909
bearbetter@bearbetter.net