About The Korea Playbook

The Korea Playbook is a deal-first training program for Western founders, export managers, and business development leaders who need South Korea to work commercially — not culturally. It is built around a simple observation: most Western companies do not fail in Korea because of price, product, or effort. They fail because they misread what was actually said in the room, choose the wrong partner, and treat a different operating system as if it were a harder version of their own.

The program contains 42 lessons across seven modules, none longer than eight minutes, covering how Korean business actually works, market entry strategy and pricing for the Korean buyer, finding and vetting distributors and partners, negotiating on a Korean timeline, the documented failure files of global brands and small exporters, operating after signature, and building a Korean network from zero. Four working documents — an entry plan, a partner vetting scorecard, a negotiation preparation sheet, and a deal pre-mortem — turn the lessons into a strategy for a specific deal rather than general knowledge.

It is designed for companies with Korea on the roadmap in the next twelve months: consumer brands entering retail and K-beauty channels, industrial suppliers negotiating with chaebol subsidiaries, SaaS and services firms appointing a local partner, and teams preparing for a first trade show or in-market hire. It is not a language course and not a general etiquette guide.

The course is created by Laura Valls Alvarez, who has spent seventeen years operating on the ground in Korea, facilitating roughly €350M in corridor transactions, and who teaches and speaks on the Korea market at events including the K-Beauty Expo at KINTEX and APICCAPS trade programs. Every lesson comes from deals she has advised, negotiated, or watched fail from close range.