What Can Brands Do with Worldbuilding? From Content to Fashion, How to Build and Use a Brand Universe
Session Overview
Once a brand has built its own universe, what should that universe actually do? The more important question is not simply how to create a world around a brand, but where and how that world can be used.
Drawing on his experience building content and IP businesses across webtoons and entertainment before expanding into fashion, Hwangbo Sang Woo will explore how worldbuilding can connect a brand's growth story with its content and create new entry points for audiences and fans.
The session will examine how a strong brand universe can become more than a storytelling device — serving as a framework for deciding how a business expands, how new initiatives connect back to the core brand, and how different experiences can remain part of one coherent identity.
It will also explore the limitations of simply transferring entertainment-style worldbuilding into fashion, and how brands can redesign those principles to fit a very different consumer, product and business environment.
A brand universe should do more than tell a story. It should help audiences enter the brand, connect its ideas and guide where the business can go next.
Speaker
In 2020, he joined HYBE, where he established the company's Story Business Division and later served as head of the business unit.
He currently leads V Division, a Company-in-Company within KOLON FnC, overseeing the upcycling fashion brand RE:CODE as well as new business initiatives.
Drawing on experience across webtoons, entertainment, intellectual property and fashion, he focuses on how storytelling and brand universes can evolve beyond content into platforms for audience growth, new experiences and business expansion.