Marie Perruchet in 2023 / Courtesy of Marie Perruchet
Marie Perruchet was born in Seoul, but Korea was not the place that taught her how to be Korean.
Sent overseas for adoption at 18 months and raised in Normandy, France, Perruchet grew up without the language, traditions or beauty rituals of her birth country. She later lived in 10 countries, worked as a correspondent for the BBC and spent years in Silicon Valley before eventually returning to Korea as an entrepreneur.
When she arrived, she was not coming back to a childhood home. She was discovering one.
That experience became part of the story behind Clapoti, the wellness brand she founded in 2022. She describes it as “loved in Paris and perfected by Korean heritage,” incorporating Korean manufacturing innovation, French sensory and scent tradition and an American instinct for functional, no-nonsense packaging.
Perruchet’s relationship with beauty had already been shaped by moving between cultures. Growing up in France, she said she rarely saw herself represented in beauty magazines. Some products weren’t designed for her skin tone, and she remembered a stylist admitting she didn’t know how to work with her type of hair.
Living around the world exposed her to very different ideas about the body. In India, she encountered reflexology and treatments that focus on circulation and tension through the feet. California exposed her to a much more ethnically diverse beauty culture. Traveling also taught her that unfamiliar environments could change how she experienced her own body.
“Traveling and living abroad stretches your body and mind in ways you don’t expect,” she said.
She first encountered the “jjimjilbang” in the United States, where she found dozens of Korean-style bathhouses. Later, she began visiting them in Korea, where the experience became something different.
What struck her was not simply the heat, baths and scrubbing. It was the lack of the polished, narrow beauty standards she had grown up seeing in magazines.
In the bathhouse, people of different ages and body types shared the same space without the usual beauty hierarchy.
“That’s where I truly understood how different reality is from what the media portrays,” she said. “And where I learned to accept myself as I am.”
Perruchet’s ability to navigate unfamiliar environments had been developing long before she founded her own company.
In Delhi, she worked as a radio journalist covering India’s growing international profile in 2005 and 2006. She moved to Shanghai to work for the BBC in 2007 and 2008, reporting on China ahead of the Beijing Olympics and Shanghai Expo and from remote areas following the Sichuan earthquake.
Radio taught her to find the heart of a story quickly.
“People listen to you when they’re maybe brushing their teeth or driving or they’re distracted,” she said. “So you really have to reel them in.”
Those skills followed her to Silicon Valley.
In 2008, Perruchet moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, arriving days before Barack Obama’s election as U.S. president. She had expected to continue covering the news. Instead, she encountered a culture where, as she put it, “everybody had a startup or an idea and a laptop or some Wi-Fi.”
Rather than retreat, she began mentoring founders at incubators and eventually worked with 500 Global. She spent years helping entrepreneurs and corporate teams communicate their ideas more clearly — work that eventually led to a book called “One Perfect Pitch,” published through McGraw-Hill.
Clapoti was shaped by Perruchet’s exposure to different self-care traditions. After years of traveling, practicing martial arts and encountering reflexology, Perruchet had become increasingly aware of her feet. She noticed how much attention beauty culture devoted to the face while leaving other parts of the body largely ignored.
The COVID-19 pandemic made the gap even more obvious. With spas and pedicures less accessible, she began thinking about what people could do for themselves at home.
She realized then that the feet were “the most forgotten part of the body.”
That observation became Clapoti. The name comes from the French word for the gentle “slush” sound of water — an idea that came to her while she was visiting a Korean spa.
Rather than license an existing Korean formula, Perruchet said she sampled dozens of products from suppliers before settling on partners willing to build custom formulations from scratch, using ingredients like green tea, hibiscus, perilla and ginger — staples of Korean cooking and traditional wellness.
“As a former journalist, you wouldn’t copy-paste the story of a colleague,” she said. “So why would I do that for a formula?”
Clapoti now operates mostly through a business-to-business model, selling its collection of face, eye and foot masks through premium retailers. The products are carried by stores and perfumeries in France and across Europe, as well as natural grocers in the U.S., with a Japanese department store launch in the works.
Clapoti’s K-beauty products are displayed for sale at a Printemps Paris store in France. Courtesy of Clapoti
Korean or French beauty?
Asked whether it is a Korean or French beauty brand, she answers: “It’s both.”
That refusal to claim a single identity mirrors her own story.
“Today, people come from so many different experiences,” she said. “Can one today only claim one place?”
Asked what draws her to Korea beyond business, Perruchet points to the mountains that cover much of the country, and to rituals she has folded into her own routine: barefoot walks in mineral mud, jjimjilbang visits and a hands-on curiosity about wellness traditions she didn’t grow up with.
Her approach to Clapoti reflects what she says she learned from K-beauty culture: ritual over intensity, heritage over trend and attention to every part of the body.
“Small, repeated care beats one big treatment,” she said. “Ten minutes, a few times a week, that’s the secret.”
Perruchet also sees K-beauty traditions as practices refined over generations rather than simply decorative heritage. And unlike routines that treat the face as the center of beauty, she believes nothing gets left out.
“Care isn’t about fixing yourself,” she said. “It’s about attention, given freely, to all of you.”
Visit clapoti.com for more information.
Alice Hong is a freelance writer and comedian based in Seoul. Follow @hippohong on Instagram.
