Chapter 71
“Ah, yes, yes. Yes, understood. Haha, thank you.”
After finishing my call with Mr. Oak from 'Namdaemun Office Furniture Distribution,' I took another drag of my cigarette in the smoking area.
“Phew…….”
Life really was rough.
Because you never knew when luck would come rolling in, or in what form.
I placed an order for all the furniture I’d gone to look at with the female staff last time but hadn’t been able to buy.
It was to rip out and completely redo the interior of the office, which looked like a smuggler’s hideout.
‘Three hundred million won, huh.’
Honestly, it stung a little.
It was nowhere near enough to buy an apartment in Seoul, but it was still a lot of money.
‘It’s an investment. All of it’s an investment.’
It would become an even greater Meracle.
Then surely, someday, I’d be able to live a life where I commute to and from work from an apartment in my own name.
“Hah.”
After finishing my cigarette and flicking the ash into the ashtray,
the son of the gukbap restaurant on the first floor seemed to have a free moment and came over to the smoking area.
“Hello.”
“Oh, hello.”
A light greeting.
Click, hiss!
The lighter seemed to be out of fuel, so I lit his cigarette with mine.
“Thanks. Hiss, phew…… Oh, right, Boss. Mom said you signed the contract through the third floor?”
“Haha, they were pretty generous with the terms.”
“Geez, we were worried because it hadn’t been rented out, so if a boss who looks favorably on the place signs the contract, we’re the ones who should be grateful.”
A building with three floors in total.
Besides the gukbap restaurant on the first floor, Meracle would now take over the second and third floors too.
You could call it a sudden business expansion.
In the first place, if I was going to manage employees, I needed at least this much space, and the exterior also looked pretty shabby.
I contacted Yoo Ji-hye, the Taphon CEO, the real expert on this sort of thing, and asked her about it.
When I asked whether the interior design had a big impact, she said it had a pretty big one.
In fact, Taphon often conducts surveys of its customers.
It seemed most of the customers who came over from Meracle answered, “It doesn’t seem trustworthy.”
From the outset, the gloomy office didn’t inspire much confidence.
‘Tsk. If I’d known that, you should’ve told me sooner.’
I knew it was funny to ask a competitor for a favor like this, but a disappointment was a disappointment.
After greeting the gukbap restaurant owner’s son, I headed back to Meracle.
“Heave, heave.”
“…….”
Renia was busily scrubbing the stairs leading up to the third floor with a mop.
Maybe she felt threatened by the new regular employee, because these days, instead of just idling on her phone when there was no work, she was trying to do all sorts of things on her own.
Watching from below without even going up there, she even made a show of wiping sweat from her forehead, though not a drop was there.
“Phew! If I work hard like this where nobody knows, the boss will surely notice and hire me as a regular employee, right?”
“…….”
“Why should some glasses-wearing weirdo who crawled out of nowhere be the regular employee instead?”
“Then don’t take a salary either.”
“How can you say that!”
As expected.
She knew I was there.
Just look at her, turning around right away to throw that back at me.
“I worked so hard! And yet you hire some good-for-nothing who can barely do anything but wave around magic!”
“Aren’t you only good for pulling a bowstring, at best?”
“Waaah! I hate you, Boss!”
She tried to come at me with the mop, so I hurriedly ran into the office.
Once inside, Kim-yang was already teaching her this and that.
“Enter.”
“Yes.”
“That’s click.”
“Sorry.”
She was separately teaching her how to manage the customer list on the laptop, but as a mage, computers still seemed unfamiliar.
Still, since she’d be staying on the third floor for a while, it would be good for her to get used to it.
“Kim-yang, don’t be so hard on her.”
“…….”
Kim-yang immediately glared at me, so I quietly sat in my seat and watched the news instead.
Anyone who invests in stocks needs to read the news carefully.
That’s how you can keep up with rapidly changing trends.
“Let’s seee-.”
A fat wallet puts the mind at ease. As I was happily watching the news, Kim-yang quietly approached.
“B-boss. Outside.”
“……Why again.”
“O-outside.”
When I went back out to the stairwell, Renia, who had just finished cleaning, was coming back inside.
“Newbie! Go make some coffee! Mix, nice and cold and sweet!”
“Understood.”
What a bizarre setup, with a part-timer telling a regular employee to make coffee.
As the boss, I wondered if I should straighten out the rules, but when I thought about the difference in their ages, maybe that was actually right.
Once we were out in the stairwell, Kim-yang asked me with her arms folded.
“D-did you order the furniture?”
“I did. The ones you mentioned last time. Dark navy base, something upscale. I’m also looking into the third-floor flooring.”
We needed a marble-like floor to match the furniture. Real marble was, of course, impossible, but there were plenty of products on the market that recreated the look.
“R-right. Th-then promotion.”
“Promotion? I guess we have to do that…… Hah, there are so many places money has to go. Maybe I should pull some out of stocks.”
If you redecorate the place, you have to promote it to match.
But that costs money too.
The world really is…… sometimes it looks simple because it runs on money, and sometimes complicated because it runs on money.
Then.
“I got one. For publicity.”
“Huh?”
“N-no, specifically sponsorship.”
“……A sponsorship?”
With a rustle, Kim-yang pulled out her phone, opened something with practiced fingers, and showed it to me.
[Custom-made Suit Brand, Aromang]
“Aromang? Why them?”
“They contacted me. For advertising.”
“You get ads from places like this too?”
This place was incredibly upscale.
I’d seen the director at Seo Hajin’s company headquarters wearing one last time.
“But you said you don’t take ads.”
“J-just this once.”
“Why?”
“Y-your suit. It, it looks awful.”
“……That bad?”
No, it was just that I’d been working out lately, so the suits I used to wear no longer fit.
“A-anyway. Okay? M-mutual promotion.”
“……I’m fine with it, but didn’t you have a lot of followers because you don’t do ads on your SNS?”
Usually, doesn’t this sort of thing tank your image after just one sponsored post?
I didn’t want Kim-yang’s carefully built SNS to end up with a bad image because of me.
“I-It’s fine.”
“Really?”
“B-boss. Your frumpy clothes are even harder to look at.”
“…….”
* * *
What I found out after work was that what Kim-yang had told me wasn’t a suggestion, but a directive.
Because we were going there right after work today.
“You’re leaving me behind?!”
Even though we said it was for work, Renia still pouted at being left behind.
Anyway, after work, we headed to the Aromang store.
Under the evening glow, as we walked calmly along, Kim-yang tapped me with her elbow.
“T-there.”
The place she pointed at was a cafe.
More precisely, it was the cafe next to the flower shop. Reichen, who had left work right on time, was chatting over coffee with Ms. Kim Dajeong.
“Heh, looks like he clocked out early just to go on a date.”
“A d-date. Maybe not.”
“If two people are spending time together right after work, that’s a date. As an employee of a matchmaking company, you should have sharp instincts.”
At my words, Kim-yang’s mouth corners lifted slightly as she nodded.
“After work. The two of them. Y-yeah, it’s a date.”
“More importantly, I heard those two didn’t work out, but now it looks like they’re trying again.”
“D-don’t get in the way. L-let’s go.”
“Tch, fine.”
If those two ended up together like that, we probably shouldn’t charge a matchmaking fee, right?
Morally speaking, we’d already gotten 300 million won and even a free worker; charging a matchmaking fee on top of that would make us basically slave traders.
“Maybe I should rent a company car. These days even that gets government subsidies, so it’s cheap.”
“I-I’m in favor.”
After talking about this and that, we arrived at the Aromang store.
The building itself wasn’t that far from our company, so we got there quickly.
“Hello.”
As we went inside, the owner, a woman in a neat suit, greeted us politely.
The employees had already left at quitting time, and it seemed she had stayed behind alone to work with us.
“B-boss. G-go inside.”
“Hm? Why?”
“Filming.”
Kim-yang took out her phone and headed toward the entrance. She said she’d film and edit it in a vlog style to upload later, and it looked like she was gathering the footage.
“Then I’ll escort you to the inside.”
Following the owner’s guidance, we went into the waiting room. Just the name alone of a custom luxury-suit specialty shop already sounded expensive.
The interior was also striking, with a heavy design of wood and green.
Maybe because I’d been looking into interiors lately, that side of it especially caught my eye.
‘Sure enough, interior design really is important. It’s a measure of a brand’s image.’
Seeing this really drove home how shabby our Meracle office was.
Brand image is also something where being first matters.
Taphon already had white and pink.
Wedding Company had red and yellow.
Royal Matching had gold and black, and so on.
Each of them already had their own personal color.
We decided to avoid them and go with dark navy instead, aiming more for the younger crowd.
“Would you like something to drink as well?”
“Ah, I’d appreciate that.”
“Please look here and place your order.”
The tablet menu was quite surprising.
I’d only expected orange juice at most, but what it listed included cocktails, whiskey, champagne, and more.
I immediately lost the urge to drink, but since there was a “free” label underneath, I ordered champagne.
A little later, Kim-yang came back in after setting her phone on a filming stand.
She was just filming without saying anything.
“Aren’t you going to say any lines or something?”
Even after I asked while sipping champagne, Kim-yang still didn’t answer.
“I wonder if that’s okay.”
After taking another sip, Kim-yang nodded.
That was basically a concept…….
“Are you going to do it with subtitles?”
She nodded.
“Ah, I see.”
Come to think of it, the posts Kim-yang usually uploaded were mostly dances.
Thinking about it, Kim-yang had only ever communicated through SNS captions or by dancing silently.
She had never actually used her voice.
“More importantly, Kim-yang, come here. Looks like you can choose the fabric too.”
I swiped the tablet over to the side, and the fabric options came up, so I showed them to Kim-yang.
A natural-enough setup for advertising.
Kim-yang filmed the tablet too.
“What do you think? Don’t you think black would suit it?”
A sigh came out immediately, as if that were my answer.
To the point that Kim-yang even lowered her phone.
“D-dark navy.”
“Why? Black is ordinary and nice.”
“A-are you kidding? You made the office black?”
“……You want me to wear this to work?”
“Th-then? Why do this? Some kind of filial-piety content?”
Seriously, what the hell…….
“No, if everyone else is dressed normally and only I’m dressed like this, it’ll look like I’m making a fuss.”
“I-I’ll match too. The same fabric.”
“Oh? So it’s a Meracle uniform?”
Kim-yang nodded.
I couldn’t help but be impressed.
“Wow, if I’d known, I should’ve brought Renia and Reichen too.”
“W-why would you bring them?”
“It’s a uniform.”
“Haa…… The boss is the boss. I, I’m the regular employee.”
“What about Reichen?”
“A, an intern.”
Is that how it works?
“Renia is the part-timer?”
She nodded.
Seeing how firm Kim-yang was, I awkwardly scratched my cheek.
“Then it’s just the two of us wearing this?”
“O-of course.”
In the end, faced with Kim-yang’s exasperated expression, I had no choice but to agree.
The story continues off the page
Floaties for Everyone
Swim lesson at the water park, and she's demonstrating on you