A Year at CARE ID (Yune Inc.)

It's been a year since I joined CARE ID, and it went by so fast that I haven't really had a chance to sit with what that year held.
So I want to try to lay it out here.

Before this job I had a different plan. I'd been accepted into PhD programs in the UK, with the research designed around Korea. I was going to extend my master's project from MA Fashion Futures at London College of Fashion, building an on-demand fashion system, pilot it in the Korean market, and bring back what I learned to help build a healthier system for the fashion and textile industry.

That plan came out of my time studying in the UK. I saw how many people over there genuinely cared about this work, and how much more developed the EU's infrastructure was for actually driving that kind of change. It threw the situation back home into sharp relief. In Korea, textiles helped power the country's early industrialisation, but mostly as low-cost manufacturing, and once the economy moved on to electronics and heavy industry, textiles were never the sector that carried its prestige or its future. So the systems and the sense of urgency around sustainability never grew here the way they did in Europe. I always knew I wanted to close that distance eventually. I just assumed I'd do it later, formally, through the PhD, on my own terms.

What changed my timeline was urgency. The fashion industry produces too much, and all that overproduction is quietly eroding demand worldwide. The regulations I'd been studying from a distance were the EU's answer to exactly that: the 2020 Circular Economy Action Plan, and the framework growing out of it, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). I think it's genuinely good for the world, and I'm excited by it. But I also knew the Korean industry wasn't ready, and I could see how fast that was about to matter. Fashion here still leans toward the domestic market and Asian or American buyers. At the same time, Hallyu (한류) is turning Korean culture into a genuine global draw and opening a path into Europe that most brands aren't built to take. The risk and the opportunity were arriving together, and both were on a clock. That wasn't something I wanted to watch from the UK for another three years.

And there's a bigger question underneath all of it. What if ESPR becomes a global standard? That isn't wishful thinking. It's the Brussels Effect, a term the scholar Anu Bradford coined for the EU's habit of setting rules the rest of the world ends up adopting, not by force, but because the market is too big to ignore. The EU's charger mandate is why Apple put USB-C on the iPhone 15. Its REACH chemical rules became the template for Korea's own K-REACH. GDPR became the default for how data is handled almost everywhere. ESPR could follow the same path, and I hope it does. That's what brought me back, and what brought me to CARE ID instead of Leeds, because our CEO is already pursuing exactly the kind of systemic change in Korea's fashion ecosystem that I had imagined pursuing through years more of study.

I remember my first month very clearly. Starting at ten in the morning, finishing near eleven at night, for what felt like one long unbroken stretch of time. We were preparing for Preview in Seoul (PIS) 2025, and the exhibition and seminar planning became the first project I led. It went well, and looking back I think it worked because of what I brought with me. Over ten years in the fashion industry across five countries, Korea, Japan, Canada, Australia, and the UK, as a designer, marketer, and researcher inside the actual supply chain. That's a way of understanding how the industry really works that's hard to grasp unless you've lived inside it. ESPR is essentially eco-design for sustainable products, and knowing what's actually feasible for a fashion company, the real barriers, the small operational details, turned out to be essential. It shaped how I approached the systems and guidance even before the delegated acts were finalised. Drawing on the ESPR textile preparatory study, I built the data schemas that brands would use to prepare their own data. I'd started there as a service owner, then titled Sustainability and Innovation Lead, working ahead of a regulation (the delegated act for textiles) that doesn't fully exist yet but is expected to land soon, likely late 2026 or early 2027.

That work took me further than I expected. Business trips to Taiwan and Hong Kong to meet global stakeholders. Attending the annual Cascale conference (formerly the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, a name change that followed some hard questions about the credibility of its own sustainability metrics), and visiting the Taiwan Textile Research Institute. Connecting with the Circular Taiwan Network, thanks to Eve, through connections from my time at LCF. A presentation at the 2025 FaW Tokyo exhibition. Leading a KOICA-funded ODA project to support the Lao government and industry toward ESPR and DPP readiness, which showed me the human and structural side of supply chains I'd only understood abstractly before. And securing a five-year national R&D project to build Korea's own DPP infrastructure, aligned with the EU's ESPR and PEFCR, aiming at a 30% cut in carbon emissions for the products involved. On top of all that I published a white paper. I almost didn't have time for it, but I felt I had to write it, because there's so much jargon and confusion around ESPR and DPP while the delegated acts are still unfinished. It was my way of putting a clearer version of the conversation on the record.

The part I care about most, though, is making sure the people I talk to actually understand why. Not just "here's what you need to prepare," but the reasoning underneath it. I think that's the most important thing I've built here: helping people move from fear and obligation toward understanding. Systemic change doesn't happen from the top down alone. It needs everyone, the industry, the regulators, and the customers who choose, use, and throw away the products, to actually agree on why it matters. I put myself in that circle too. We make what we make because there's demand, and arguing over whether it's marketing or the customer who creates that demand isn't really the point. The point is finding a way for everyone involved to feel that what we're doing makes sense.

Not all of it was uplifting. I've met people in this space who are supposedly doing this work but care more about fame or profit than the actual purpose behind it. I once heard someone who's meant to be driving the same change I believe in say, "we don't have to work this hard," and it clarified something for me. Fame isn't my compass, and while making decent money matters, it isn't the whole point. If you got lucky and made money off something you didn't really believe in, would you be proud to spend that money on the people you love? I want to be able to answer yes to that, honestly, about the work I do.

I usually stay at a company for about a year and then move on. That's been my pattern, because honestly I never quite felt fulfilled. This time feels different. I want to stay, and keep building the kind of coverage and insight that can genuinely feed back into the system, for the company, for the industry, and eventually beyond it. My path from fashion designer to Chief Sustainability Officer happened faster than I expected, and it came with more responsibility than I originally signed up for. It also cost me something concrete: I turned down a confirmed PhD place to be here. I don't regret it. What I'm doing at CARE ID is that work in the real world, faster and messier than any personal project of mine could have been. But the cost was real, not just hypothetical, and I think that's worth saying plainly.

Along the way I've met remarkable people, been trusted by my team whenever I suggested something new, and gotten to do work that actually matters to me. I still carry uncertainty. I'm still tired sometimes, still stretched across too many roles at once: global client relations, strategy, R&D, sometimes even branding and marketing. But under the exhaustion there's something that feels like the right kind of hard.

So that's the year with CARE ID. Not a straight line, and not the road I had planned, but a more direct one, and closer to the work I always wanted to do. People have told me I'm too idealistic. I've made my peace with that. I'd rather stay that way and slowly turn those ideals into something real, and share the journey as it unfolds, with the people who make it worth doing.