Why I Started Clapoti

It found me in a jjimjilbang — one of Seoul's 4,000-plus bathhouses. Hot stone rooms. Cold plunge pools. Rows of people lying flat on heated floors. Chatting. Sleeping. Doing absolutely nothing. Just heat, stillness, and the slow work of letting the body reset itself.

I was born in Seoul, grew up in France, and it took a professional life of globe-trotting to bring me back to these rituals. Once I found them again, they stuck with me in a way no French spa or skincare counter ever quite matched. Paris does skincare sensorially — texture, scent, the pleasure of the routine itself. Korea does it functionally and communally — ingredients that work, rituals that are shared, an honesty about what skin actually needs. I kept waiting for a brand that held both truths at once. It never arrived. So I built it.

Clapoti started as an answer to a simple question: what if the jjimjilbang ritual — the warmth, the pause, the masking, the acupressure — could travel home with you? Not as an Asian fad. As something special enough for a Tuesday night, and considered enough to actually do something for your skin.

The home care that didn't exist

Here's the thing nobody had solved: you could go to a jjimjilbang. You could book a spa day. But there was no way to bring that ritual home — no product built to fit into an ordinary evening, on an ordinary Tuesday, with nowhere near you to book. The category had spas. It didn't have home care.

I live on planes as much as I live at home — Paris, Seoul, and everywhere in between. And feet take the worst of it. Hours standing in airport lines. Ill-fitting shoes on a twelve-hour flight. Hotel bathrooms with nothing but a bar of soap. Feet are the first thing to suffer when you travel, and the last thing anyone packs for. I wanted something that could go anywhere — in a carry-on, in a hotel room, in the back of a taxi — and actually work.

Why not just book a pedicure

Because a pedicure doesn't survive contact with real life. You book it two weeks out. You sit for an hour you don't have. And a week later, the polish is chipped and the heels are back to square one. It's high-maintenance for a low-lasting result. I didn't want maintenance. I wanted something you could do in fifteen minutes, on your own schedule, that actually held up — no salon chair required.

The beauty shelf had two extremes. Mass-market Korean beauty — accessible, but often generic, disconnected from the ritual culture it came from. And old heritage Korean skincare, positioned so far upmarket it felt estranged — more about status than the actual experience of care. Nobody was building their own way: authentic, clean formulation, full-body ritual instead of just face, and the sensory groundedness that makes people actually want to slow down and use it.

That's the space Clapoti lives in. Not the loudest brand on the shelf. Not the most exclusive. Just the one that remembers what the ritual was for in the first place.

What "clean" means to me

I'm not interested in clean beauty as a marketing checkbox. Every Clapoti formula is vegan, abides by cruelty-free standards, and is independently rated 84 to 96 out of 100 on Yuka — the kind of scrutiny that doesn't leave much room to hide. That matters to me because I'm not just building a brand. I'm building something I want my own daughter to trust when she reads the label.

A face mask is easy to sell. A ritual is harder — it asks something of you. It asks you to sit still for fifteen minutes, to feel the warmth work into your feet or your under-eyes, to notice your own body instead of scrolling past it. That's the part of Korean spa culture I wanted to protect most: not the ingredients list, but the rigorous wish to pause.

Clapoti is still small. I'm the one answering emails from distributors, negotiating shelf space, and packing samples between flights to Seoul and back. But every part of that work — the formulation, the sourcing, the retail conversations — comes back to the same original feeling: warm floor, quiet room, mask on, nowhere to be.

That's what I'm trying to give people. Not another step in a ten-step routine. A reason to stop.

Ready? Step this way.

— Marie, Founder, Clapoti