Photo : Sangbin Jeon, CEO of MeTown Inc.

To celebrate the launch of Tech Seoul, we started interviewing Korean startup CEOs. Today, for the 12th installment, we met with Sangbin Jeon, CEO of MeTown Inc.

Hello, Mr. Sangbin Jeon, thank you for your time. I think this interview with Sangbin Jeon, CEO of MeTown Inc, Fashion-focused AI/CG tech company providing 3D digital solutions for fashion trading, will be very interesting and informative for Tech Seoul readers.

Q: Please introduce your company.

Our company, MeTown Inc., is a fashion-specialized AI/CG tech company that provides 3D digital solutions for online fashion transactions, aiming to innovate customer experiences for our fashion clients. We were founded in 2023 through a collaboration between graduate students in Computer Science from Yonsei University and the Yonsei University Technology Holdings Company. Leveraging our R&D-focused team's strengths, we offer fashion clients the EVOVA 3D ShowRoom (service for building detailed 3D thumbnail pages). In an evolving market environment, innovative digital solutions are essential for online fashion companies to secure competitiveness through customer experience innovation and achieve sustainable growth. Our company aims to successfully lead digital innovation of our clients' online fashion transactions and grow together as partners.

Q: What projects did you work on in 2024?

This May, MeTown actually launched its first service, EVOVA 3D ShowRoom. This service builds photorealistic online 3D viewers for clients including but not limited to fashion brands. The name EVOVA means "try-on" in Korean. In July, MeTown was invited to exhibit at Asia's largest art festival, successfully collaborating on 3D exhibitions with 12 fashion brands and platforms, resulting in the discovery of numerous new clients and customers. Additionally, during this period, we were selected for the open innovation program of a Korea’s well-known home shopping company, building a PoC. Beyond this, we are also preparing for exhibitions at the world's largest sneaker festival, SneakerCon Seoul 2024, and CES 2025 in Las Vegas next year.

Q: What's the story behind your company?

Our team is made up of graduate students in Computer Science who genuinely really enjoy online clothes shopping. Our researchers have published numerous papers in top-tier conferences like ACM SIGGRAPH and journals like IEEE TVCG in the fields of computer graphics and computer science. We found that the academic research process—defining problems, developing solutions, experimenting, and analyzing—is quite similar to the process of starting a business.

However, starting a company felt more practical and rewarding. Leveraging our R&D capabilities, we initially participated in startup competitions, winning awards like the Minister of Science and ICT Award at the 2021 ICT Startup Challenge and reaching the Top 10 in the Challenge K-Startup Grand Final, which helped us refine our business model.

Q: How do you set project goals?

At MeTown, we always set project goals with a focus tailored to our clients' needs. We enhance our unique technology through technology-focused R&D and expand our market share through marketing R&D. We conduct technical simulations and benchmarking to quantify the effectiveness of these innovations in achieving our goals and perform usability studies in collaboration with academia to improve user experience. In marketing projects, particularly with EVOVA 3D ShowRoom, we explore and implement various use cases beyond simple online product pages. To support this, we develop and experiment with diverse ideas and utilize well-known collaboration tools to ensure efficient teamwork and project management.

Q: What does success mean for you and your company?

For MeTown, success means revolutionizing the paradigm of online shopping for clothing and accessories through our 3D online fitting room.

Q: If there have been any issues you've encountered lately, please let us know how you overcame them.

To integrate a 3D online fitting room service and infrastructure, the automatic 3D digitization of clothing is essential. Currently, most of our competitors rely on manual graphic design and labor-intensive processes for this task. At MeTown, we have successfully developed the necessary technology for automatic 3D clothing digitization and are now working on related technologies to realistically reconstruct 3D body shape avatars for the online fitting room. During this R&D period, we launched the EVOVA 3D ShowRoom, which allows clients to view their products in 3D on an online platform, utilizing our advanced automatic clothing digitization technology. We have focused on a single zoom-in pivot for enhanced detail.

Q: Where do you see your company in three years?

We believe that within three years, MeTown will have successfully captured market share in the fashion tech sector with EVOVA 3D ShowRoom. We will have secured numerous fashion brands as clients, established a wide buyer network, and be launching and refining our second business model, the 3D online fitting room.

Q: How does your company develop talent?

MeTown fundamentally values people that are self-motivated and passionate about personal growth. As a tech company, we work with individuals who can add imagination to R&D and focus on feasibility in product development and business activities.

Q: What are your strengths and weaknesses?

Whether as a researcher or as a co-founder of MeTown, I always consider potential risks or various scenarios before thinking of solutions and taking action. However, as the saying goes, "You won't know until you try," there may be positive possibilities that could be overlooked in the process of only calculating without trying. Fortunately, my co-founders and employees with opposite tendencies complement this weakness with quick execution, resulting in great synergy.