Last year, LE SSERAFIM introduced their very own brand through their first pop up space. This year, they’re back with the LE SSERAFIM 2024 S/S POP UP, this time teaming up with AUFGLET, Peaches., KREAM, and CASETiFY. We got the inside scoop behind this year’s EASY comeback tie-in pop up and the growing lifestyle brand that is LE SSERAFIM right from the source: SOURCE MUSIC Creative Director Nu Kim, Marketing Team member Jung Jihea, Design Department representative Baek Yoovin, IPX Logistics/Event & Retail Department Hwang Bo Hee, Merchandising Team Lee Hae Lin, and Interior Design Department Shim So Mi and Byeon Hee Lim.
What led you to collaborate with AUFGLET, Peaches., KREAM, and CASETiFY for the 2024 S/S POP UP?
Nu Kim: LE SSERAFIM is a “cool and admirable team” that does not give into biases and keeps on walking. This very challenging spirit is the basis for our pop ups and brand campaigns to keep expanding, never confined to a single category. It’s that same spirit that forms the basis for collaborations with lifestyle brands in sectors like food and beverage, techwear, and automotive, through which LE SSERAFIM has become positioned as a kind of lifestyle brand themselves.
Hwang Bo Hee: This pop up was held in a fairly unknown area called Geumho-dong, which is where AUFGLET’s main store is. Collaborating with AUFGLET seemed like a great way to give visitors the chance to experience not only the pop up itself but also different ways of enjoying the neighborhood at the same time.
Lee Hae Lin: What really impressed us about Peaches. as a brand is that they do more than simply sell merch—they’re also expanding into various fields like event spaces and festivals. But surprisingly, this collaboration with LE SSERAFIM was the first time they ever worked directly with an artist like this. Peaches. is an automotive lifestyle brand, which is why, if you look at the merch we made in collaboration with them, it includes stickers for cars. These stickers are designed to a different specification from normal ones so that they’ll stick to cars, and that’s Peaches.’ trademark product. We also collaborated with KREAM, which was absolutely groundbreaking. We already have Weverse as our distribution platform, but the LE SSERAFIM brand looks to be a lifestyle brand, and given that we wanted to broaden our target audience, we ended up distributing via Weverse and KREAM simultaneously for the first time.
Jung Jihea: Teaming up with AUFGLET and Peaches. lets us get LE SSERAFIM’s message across in-person at the pop up, while our collaboration with KREAM and CASETiFY allowed us to spread the message of EASY to even more people online.
What made you decide to continue with the food and drink collaborations from the previous 2023 S/S POP UP and use desserts as a medium to convey LE SSERAFIM’s message?
Nu Kim: The LE SSERAFIM brand takes the idea of health and turns it into something fun. It’s more about living a healthy life by eating what you want and having fun than just looking to appear healthy. With that in mind, we wanted to have a combination of athletic wear and desserts to paint a picture of a lifestyle defined by healthy pleasures.
Baek Yoovin: I think that experiences that engage all five of the senses stick with you far longer than purely visual ones. For that reason, food is an excellent medium through which to express our brand and a way to expand our scope as a lifestyle brand without limiting ourselves to clothing and accessories.
Hwang Bo Hee: We talked about how to extend the pop up experience into the outside world through food offerings. Among our options, we chose cakes as they have the most room for visual creativeness. For instance, we recreated SAKURA’s nosebleed scene from the “Good Bones” trailer with red blueberry jam in a meringue to connect it visually with the theme of the album.
If the core message of the last 2023 S/S POP UP was “the wholesome lifestyle that the group is after,” what did you want to emphasize this time around? The interactive area of 2024 S/S POP UP was very memorable, with its mud, bushes, and white feathers engaging both smell and touch.
Jung Jihea: The LE SSERAFIM brand is still after a message of a fun and wholesome lifestyle, and the group’s work is autobiographical, so whereas the previous pop up was about saying, “We’re LE SSERAFIM,” the latest one was a direct reflection of the questions and concerns the group brings up in their new album, EASY. Some people say it was easy to get here, but it wasn’t. I worked really hard at it—that’s just who I am. We wanted to make LE SSERAFIM’s innermost thoughts like that something that FEARNOT and everyone else could all relate to.
Nu Kim: The aim of this pop up was to find a space where we could pull back the curtain on the incredible effort and endless practice LE SSERAFIM puts into making the hard parts look easy. From that perspective, Geumho Alver was a very humble place, and the high ceilings made it ideal for hanging a fabric poster of SAKURA from the “Good Bones” trailer for EASY over the side of the building, as well as for installing the interactive media piece with AR filters inside. And we wanted the basement of the pop up to be dark and gloomy to convey how LE SSERAFIM’s journey hasn’t been an easy one.
Baek Yoovin: The main motif of the basement was lotus flowers and feathers. Lotus flowers thrive even in muddy, dirty water, and we wanted to take that ability to bloom in even the most dire situations and use it to show resilience. The feathers, meanwhile, represent the path LE SSERAFIM has taken to get to where they are. The group’s always used feathers in interesting ways. In the last trailer, KAZUHA’s wings were on fire, and in this trailer, dark feathers spring back up on her wings. Even the EASY album cover has feathers. By using feathers in so many different and interesting ways, we aim to depict the path the group members have taken.
Shim So Mi: We wanted to show off the gritty essence of the desolate shell that’s left after everything’s been destroyed, and that’s why we ended up going to Geumho Alver. As you might know, we guided the people who visited the pop up from the first floor, to the second floor, and finally the basement, in that order. The first floor where they entered, and the second floor with the checkout counter, had elegant moving curtains and other fabrics, with beautiful black-and-white videos of LE SSERAFIM being projected onto them. But the basement stood in stark contrast, with the gritty ambience of a dank swamp with thorny paths. You followed the feathers through the brush, and that led to an interactive media exhibit with AR filters—one with a huge piece of fabric that showed a video of whoever’s there with a nosebleed after shooting lasers, like SAKURA.
Byeon Hee Lim: Basically, this latest LE SSERAFIM 2024 S/S POP UP created a space where people could feel and relate to the message behind EASY: where LE SSERAFIM shows what they’ve been through, and that you, as the visitor, can do it, too. There weren’t really any run-of-the-mill photo spots this time around. You could argue that the interactive exhibit has become the modern pop up’s photo booth, but it wasn’t there to look pretty—it was meant to allow visitors to engage with LE SSERAFIM more directly.
Among the merchandise is the BADGE SET, which features two phrases in Korean: “For me” and “Be yourself.” Why did you choose to use these phrases rather than a logo or the album name?
Nu Kim: It all comes down to LE SSERAFIM in the end. The group is tackling new challenges constantly, whether it’s through music, choreography, or otherwise. And it’s the same with us, the production crew. We’re always tasked with new challenges and have to come up with something fresh, and every time, I spend a lot of time thinking about what angle to approach it from. I’ve found that, as long as I do my best in a way that keeps true to myself—“for me”—there’s nothing to feel any regret about, no matter how things turn out in the end. That’s why I wanted to share this slogan with the LE SSERAFIM members, the rest of the crew, and even FEARNOT.
Jung Jihea: Those two phrases perfectly captured our message. As he mentioned, LE SSERAFIM never allows themselves to be subjected to narrow-minded thinking. The idea that what’s written on merch needs to be in a specific language, or that, if there are five members, the posters need to feature an equal balance of all five of them, are themselves a kind of narrow way of viewing things. We always just choose to do whatever best conveys our message.