Jaeyung Kwon, co-founder of Museeum: Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun. Speaking to us this week is Jaeyung Kwon (LinkedIn), co-founder of Museeum.

My name is Jaeyung Kwon, co-founder of Museeum. I am a mother of two, Hana and Soraya.I used to be an investment banker for JP Morgan in London before I settled in Cairo. We never really formally decided on job titles, but I’d say I’m the finance director of the company and my co-founder Indjy Taher is the creative director. Our company is a retail management company specializing in the gift shops of different heritage destinations, including the Grand Egyptian Museum.

As you can tell from my background, I’m really big on numbers and data. I’m usually looking at the fair value that we’re creating for both suppliers and our clients — that is, the people who buy our products — and also just doing a lot of analysis around the kind of merchandise that is most impactful for our clients, who are usually tourists given that we are a cultural kind of destination curator. But there’s also the cultural traveler, there’s the Egyptophile traveler, there’s the academic, and there’s the tourist who’s just here for a selfie — so even within that one category of customer, there’s plenty to think about. My partnership with my co-founder is highly collaborative — especially now where it’s more of a design house, with the creative director wanting one thing and I have to figure out the numbers to make it happen.

As a foreigner who came to Egypt ten years ago, I always struggled with the disconnect between the beauty of Egypt’s historic destinations and artifacts and the limited selection of souvenirs and merch that you can get from these destinations. Many of the things you get aren’t made in Egypt and they don’t really help you cherish the memory from these visits. It never felt like they carried the depth of the impact these visits had on me. So the basic question was, why don’t we have something amazing? So when I was brought in to curate a selection for the GEM shop, it was really important for me that everything had to be made in Egypt.

Then one day, I walked into a store in Zamalek, where I would bump into my current co-founder — and she was already doing exactly what I was thinking about on a smaller scale. So I asked her if she was interested in partnering up, and she was fortunately on board.

One trend I’ve noticed in the culture/heritage merchandise market is a change in how we talk about income generation. Traditionally, talking openly about income generation and innovation was considered taboo, despite it being such an important part of the business. I personally try to read up a lot on industry wholesale reports and try to push the team’s focus towards what is “hot” and what can sell. Buying local and being sustainable has been a trend for some time now, and nostalgia is another trend that we’re trying to capitalize on. We don’t necessarily follow every trend, but incorporating some of these into our merchandise mix makes the overall collection feel more contemporary, and I think customers appreciate that.

I’m usually up around 6am, just in time to get my two daughters ready for school. Once I put them on the school bus, that’s when my morning starts. That’s when I read EnterpriseAM Egypt while scrolling through it with my morning coffee. Then I’m usually in the office at around 8:30am to get started with work. I pick up my girls from school around 4pm, and I stay with them till their bed time. Sometimes if I have a lot of work to do, I’ll do it in the evening after the kids fall asleep.

My work days are never the same. Some days it’s back-to-back calls with different partners, trying to get a more structured legal framework around our partnership, for example, and some days revolve around deep diving into how the operations are doing and getting into the nitty gritty of everything. Sometimes it’s a very relaxing day for me, but not for my partner, especially when we’re in the process of selecting what would work best and what wouldn’t after receiving the initial samples, so everyday is very different at work. My team relies on me a lot for the financial input, the data input, and the operations input. So yeah, it’s pretty busy and it takes me to very different places everyday, which I find interesting and fascinating.

The one constant in my day is my morning coffee and my afternoon Korean soap opera. After I put the kids to bed, I spend about an hour catching up with the latest Korean soap that’s out there. That’s how I stay connected with my own culture.

Another constant I have are my Monday catch ups. My husband and I have this system where we don’t make plans to meet up with people on Thursday or Friday, when people usually meet up. This raises some eyebrows among our friends — but the way we see it, nobody’s tired from a week’s worth of work when you go out on Monday. And with this system we manage to keep up with at least 52 different friends throughout the year. I’m a person who prefers meaningful, one-on-one catch ups, and I think this method facilitates that for us.

How I stay focused and organized? For me, everything stems from a spreadsheet. I think since my career in banking, I tend to see everything in data and in spreadsheets. Everything from my daughters’ school schedules to my meetings, it’s all in a spreadsheet on my phone — or if a week is particularly busy, it’s on a spreadsheet that I’ll have printed out in front of me. I’m generally a very organized person, I’m one of those people who don’t really need to snooze their alarms to wake up. If I have to be up at 6am, then 6am it is.

Becoming a business owner in Egypt is more than I ever thought I’d be doing. I used to work for a bunch of big organizations like IBM, JP Morgan, Lehman Brothers — organizations that always have structure. I always considered myself a person who’s good at executing ideas rather than being the person with the ideas. So this is uncharted territory for me, both in terms of being an entrepreneur, and doing so in a country where I may not have as many connections and networks, and without being fluent in the language. So working on this project and making sure that we achieve the vision we’ve set out is what’s next for me.

It’s really all about showcasing what Egypt can do, the impact that Egyptian artisans and handicrafts can have, and showcasing the work of these artists properly and making it interesting for foreigners. We want to be a conduit for bringing this work to the forefront of quality and design.

One thing I learned working in investment banking is you don’t get a work-life balance unless you actively plan it. You have to manage your life that way, and you have to be determined to have it. It’s so easy to just carry on working and try to finish everything you have to do, but sometimes I think it’s good to pause — and for me, that 3 hour pause I take between 4-7pm is almost like my medicine to carry on with work the next day.

At home, my bookshelf is kind of separate from everyone else’s. I’m a big fan of business books and stuff with a lot of numbers — books that are logical and straightforward, so to speak. The Power of Habit is one I really like. Generally, I try to really practice what I read from books like that. As for TV shows, I’d recommend a Korean medical drama called Hospital Playlist. If I have one podcast to recommend, it would be an Egyptian podcast called What I Did Next by Malak Fouad.

The best piece of advice I ever got came from my father. When I was first starting my career, he said “be proud enough to ask questions, be humble enough to accept help.” I think one of the things my team finds refreshing is that when I don’t know something, I just ask for help. I don’t assume I know everything, and there’s a lot of things both in this business and in life where it’s better to get other people’s opinions on things. So it’s asking questions, and doing it with your head held high.

Tags: