Brand Management ERP.

Before TAM, There Was a Real Market.

Why We Started Artnex

from an Extremely Small Market?

When people talk about startups, the first question is almost always the same.

“How big is the market?”
“What’s the TAM?”

But when you actually start building a company, a far more important question appears:

Who will pay—right now?

We began with that question.

The Brand Problem Was Never About Taste.

It Was About Structure. We’ve worked closely with many brands—small business owners, freelancers, founders managing multiple brands at once.

Across all of them, the same issue kept repeating.

A brand’s core question is simple:
“What value does this brand deliver to its customer?”

Yet in reality:

The brand tone changes every time a freelancer changes

Messaging shifts whenever an agency is replaced

Each channel presents a different version of the same brand

The problem wasn’t talent.
It wasn’t effort. It was the absence of a brand operating structure.

Small Brands Were Already Spending Money

Just Inefficiently, One important fact became clear very early. Small businesses were not avoiding marketing spend.

They were already paying for it.

Design revisions

Content production

Advertising agencies

Freelance marketers and designers

The real issue was this: Money was being spent, but brand assets were not accumulating.

Every project started from scratch.
Every freelancer needed to be re-briefed.
Every decision depended on the founder’s memory.

Eventually, every founder asks the same question: “Can this be managed as a system?”

Artnex was built as the answer.

Artnex Is Not a Tool That “Creates” Brands.

Calling Artnex a design tool or a marketing tool is inaccurate.

We define Artnex as: A non-financial ERP for brand operations.

Stores and enforces brand tone, messaging, and identity

Manages marketing and design based on brand logic, not individuals

Allows freelancers, agencies, and internal teams to work under one shared standard

In short:

It doesn’t matter who does the work— what matters is the brand system they work within.

Why We Chose a “Small” Market on Purpose.

Many startups proudly say:

“There are hundreds of millions of SMBs globally.”

That statement is true. But in early-stage execution, it’s meaningless.

From day one, Artnex defined an extremely narrow beachhead market.

We used only three filters.

1. Are they already spending money?

Brands actively paying for marketing, design, or freelance services.

2. Is the operation human-dependent?

Founders acting as the final bottleneck for all brand decisions.

3. Do they want to grow?

Brands that see branding as a long-term asset, not a short-term campaign.

Only those who met all three conditions were counted.

What Remained After Filtering

The result was surprisingly small—and extremely real.

Korean small brands actively outsourcing branding and marketing
→ ~100,000–150,000 brands

Freelancers managing multiple brand clients
→ ~50,000–80,000 professionals

Foreign brands preparing to enter the Korean market (beauty, fashion, lifestyle)
→ ~10,000–20,000 brands

In total:
roughly 200,000 high-intent users.This is not a hypothetical market.

These users:

Are already paying

Are already experiencing operational pain

Can convert without education-heavy sales cycles

Why We Talk About SOM Before TAM.

Yes, Artnex has a massive global TAM.

Hundreds of millions of SMBs. Billions of freelancers. But we talk about that last.

Because early-stage success depends on market density, not market size.

Our position is simple:

“We don’t need hundreds of millions of users to prove this business. We need to serve the 200,000 brands that already need structure today. If we win there, everything else scales naturally.”

Expansion Happens at the Speed of Brand Growth.

Artnex becomes more valuable as brands grow.

More channels

More freelancers

More regions

More languages

At a certain scale, brand consistency cannot live in human memory. It must live in a system.

That’s why Artnex starts in Korea and expands globally as a brand management AI SaaS.

This is not marketing expansion.It is operational structure export.

We Treat Branding as Infrastructure, Not Emotion

Artnex is not here to make brands look better.

It exists to make brands:

Stable

Repeatable

Scalable

Markets change. Channels change. People change.

Brands with structure survive those changes.

That is why we deliberately started small.

At the exact point where brand management stops being optional and becomes unavoidable.