Young K-pop Fans Are Becoming K-pop Business Owners Across the Southeast
Alexis Bishop
Inside Ploghvey Kpop, Knoxville, Tennessee’s first K-pop store, the walls are lined with the latest albums, photocards, and lightsticks. Fans of all ages gather at the store’s small white tables and benches to sift through thick photocard binders, trading their faves and making new friendships along the way. ATEEZ’s “WORK” music video plays on two of the large flat-screen TVs hovering over the checkout area, with fans and employees alike singing and sometimes dancing along. There’s an excitement in the air that can only be found in such a gathering, small clusters of fans throughout the room gleefully conversing about their favorite Korean pop artists.
You’ll also likely see 16-year-old store owner Hannah Lee running the register. Lee is a Knoxville resident who has brought her love for K-pop to the quickly-growing community in the south. Though K-pop isn’t new to the southeast by any means, Ploghvey is the first store of its kind in East Tennessee. “Our mission is to bring fans together, and K-pop to Tennessee,” Lee tells Teen Vogue.
Ploghvey Kpop opened in the heart of Knoxville in the spring of 2024, after months of hard work from store owner Lee and her dedicated team. Lee and her manager, 19-year-old Lindsey French, held a soft opening of the new shop on January 13 and saw a successful grand opening on April 27.
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The journey to opening the store was a long one. In 2022, Lee founded KPOP TENNESSEE, the first non-profit in Tennessee dedicated to K-pop, when she was only 14 years old. The organization brought local K-pop fans together through cupsleeve events, photocard trading meetups, and pop-ups to sell albums and other merch. The organization took off quickly, finding a handful of regular volunteers to help run the events and amassing a loyal following. Now, small businesses throughout the Southeast, concert promoters, and even tour promoters for smaller K-pop groups are reaching out to them to collaborate on events.
It’s also where Lee met French, who started going to the non-profit’s cupsleeve events, where fans create and trade custom paper cupsleeves often dedicated to a specific K-pop group for an anniversary, a member’s birthday, or another milestone event. The events also featured games and decorating stations as K-pop fans in Knoxville gathered to celebrate the musicians they love and to connect with others with the same interests.
“The community is very much so here, and there are a lot of fans,” French says, “but it feels hard to connect with other fans sometimes if there’s not spaces or events to do so in, and so that’s what I really liked about KPOP TENNESSEE and why I so happily joined.”
As the organization and its fanbase grew, Lee and her team began to build out the concept for East Tennessee’s first K-pop store. Opening it, however, wasn’t so easy. Lee says that she was able to start the store with a combination of money from her family, savings, and funds generated from selling albums at events through KPOP TENNESSEE. She bought 20 boxes of albums to get started, operating first out of her garage and then at pop-up events throughout the South, including in Atlanta, Nashville, and Louisville, Kentucky. The success of those events enabled the inception of a Ploghvey Kpop storefront, right on Knoxville’s bustling Kingston Pike.
“I never expected to open a store,” Lee says. “I think because of the timing and community and fanbase, it really worked out well.”
When she isn’t running the store, she takes her high school classes online and is actively studying business and entrepreneurship. She says online schooling has given her a schedule flexible enough to continue her education and run the store full-time. Though she’s busier than most teens, Lee pushes forward to support the local K-pop community.
“You can see the drastic increase in K-pop in the area,” she says, mentioning the growth of KPOP TENNESSEE’s Instagram followers and outreach from local venues, like bubble tea shops, who want to collaborate on events. “I think it’s really important to bring the fans together, and show [K-pop] companies that there’s a really strong fanbase here in Tennessee.”
French notes that since joining KPOP TENNESSEE, and since Ploghvey’s opening, the attendance turnout for their events has skyrocketed. They’ve also noticed more fan-led events being hosted throughout the area, as well as concerts creeping closer to the eastern side of the state. Showing this popularity to companies could lead to more K-pop concerts in the region. Three hours away, Nashville has already seen an uptick in K-pop shows in the past few years as K-pop has grown more popular in the U.S., with performances from groups like P1Harmony, A.C.E., and VIVIZ.
Though both Lee and French knew Knoxville had a K-pop fanbase, there were still doubts about whether the store would be able to thrive. “You’re not sure if it’ll succeed, because nobody has done it before,” Lee says.
Luckily, their anxieties were soon put to rest ; on the day of their grand opening, over 350 people turned out to support them.
Lee isn’t the only K-pop-fan-turned-business-owner on the younger side bringing K-pop storefronts to the South. IDOLL Music Kpop Store opened in March 2024 in Greenville, officially making it South Carolina’s first K-pop store.
Kayla Jones, 26, is one of IDOLL’s co-owners, running the shop with her friend Meili Wray, 32. Wray started the brand and asked Jones to join her about a month later. Before they owned their own storefront, IDOLL sold K-pop products online and at local pop-up events. As they continued to sell, they noticed that the community was growing, with more events being hosted every month.
“Our main focus with IDOLL is the community. We wanted to make sure that everyone knows that they have IDOLL as a safe space,” Jones says.
The two decided to start selling stationery items to make the store more community-driven. “We notice a lot of people in the K-pop community love deco and stationery, and this was a good outlet for them by doing journaling, so we incorporated that into IDOLL Music as well,” Jones says. That community support is crucial to their goals and success.
“Community helped us get this going. So many people have come to our pop-ups and said, ‘I’m only going to buy my albums from you guys so you can get started,’ because they wanted to see a K-pop store here in Greenville,” she says. “So it was really nice of the community for getting us where we are. We’ve been very lucky meeting such lovely people who want to see small businesses grow.”
Lexie Klimek, 23, shares her own success as a young K-pop store co-owner. In February 2024, Klimek found herself becoming co-owner of Oppang K-pop Store in Raleigh, North Carolina, after a change in management. Now, she runs the shop with her team, including staff member Olivia McGuire, 21, who is Oppang’s E-Commerce/Website Management Specialist.
Oppang opened as North Carolina’s first K-pop store in May 2016, when the original owners relocated from South Korea. After closing for a period in 2020 due to the pandemic, they re-opened a storefront in 2022 with strong support from past customers.
Klimek had been working at the store as head manager for two years before becoming a co-owner. Klimek then reached out to McGuire, asking if she’d be interested in joining her at the store, saying she would be a good fit to join the team.
“She actually sent me a DM and was like, ‘Hey, one of our old workers is leaving, you’ve come to the store a bunch,’ which I had, and she was like, ‘I think it would be a good fit, do you want to come join?’ and I was like, ‘Absolutely I do!’” McGuire says over Zoom.
Both started as K-pop fans back around 2017, not realizing the excitement the genre would bring to their future. “It’s cool being a fan of something and realizing that you can make a career out of it, and help other fans in the area as well,” Klimek says.
Both Klimek and McGuire also note that their success has largely been thanks to their loyal customers throughout the years, as well as the supportive K-pop community in the area. In 2023, Oppang expanded by opening a second location in Charlotte after countless requests and an outpouring of support from fans at their original location. The new shop is nestled inside a Super G Mart International Market.
“We’ve been really lucky, and the whole process of it has definitely been surrounded by loyal locals who are here for us,” Klimek says. McGuire adds, “We’ve really built a community around this place, which I think is probably one of our biggest strengths and why we can have that reach.” They’re currently looking for more locations to expand into. “It just feels really surreal for us to think that we could possibly have this big of a foot in the door for the K-pop community,” Klimek says.
K-pop’s growth isn’t new to those paying attention, but it’s taken a bit longer for it to swell in the South from an in-person standpoint. K-pop fandoms have always thrived online, but finding a local K-pop community in the Southern states is now becoming a reality for many fans.
For Asian Americans living in the Southeast, finding these communities is even more meaningful. Reflecting on her journey toward becoming a teenage K-pop store owner, Lee says that K-pop helped her embrace her identity as a Chinese American. “As an Asian growing up in America, my parents were immigrants, so I felt like I didn’t belong in this country or even in the motherland, because I wasn’t as Chinese as all the Chinese kids, and I wasn’t as American as Americans,” she says. “K-pop really helped me realize, ‘Oh, it’s okay to be different.’”
She also notes how it feels seeing Asian performers gain so much popularity in the US: “Seeing BTS on the screen, and Asian representation, I think it just really made me happy and feel like I belong.”
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As the shop continues to grow, Lee, French, and the rest of their team look forward to using the store for good in the community. “We’ve done a few charity projects by donating food to the food bank, and money to children’s gifts and hospitals,” Lee says. Contributing to these causes, bringing the community together, and supporting small businesses are just some of the pros both Ploghvey Kpop and KPOP TENNESSEE have brought to Knoxville.
Fans like Lee and French are also encouraging the community to keep supporting the artists that do come to the Southeast. “The more we support them, the more other groups are going to come,” Lee says.
“Support your local K-pop shops!” she adds, laughing.
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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