Why buy another fridge just for kimchi?

Kimchi ripened in jars buried in the ground. Even when it dropped to minus 10°C outside, inside a jar in the soil it stayed around minus 1°C. At that temperature, just short of freezing, kimchi slowly gained flavor all winter. Kimchi kept on a refrigerator shelf soon turned sour.

Goldstar released the first kimchi refrigerator in 1984. Families still buried jars in their yards then, so it did not catch on. In the 1990s, more families moved into apartments, and the new homes had no yard to bury a jar in.

In 1993, Mando Machinery, a maker of car parts and air conditioners, set up a kimchi research institute. Over three years it made and ripened 1 million heads of cabbage kimchi to find the temperature of a kimchi jar underground. Cold air is heavy, so when a lid opens upward, the cold stays pooled inside. So instead of a door, it put a lid on top like a jar, and instead of circulating cold air, it made the walls cold like soil. The name came not from the word refrigerator but from an old word for kimchi. Dimchae became jimchi, and then kimchi.

Dimchae came out in November 1995. But no one could be talked into buying a second refrigerator for a home that already had one. You only know how kimchi tastes after eating it through the winter. That winter, 3,000 units went into the homes of chefs and homemakers for six months, free of charge. Those households ate kimjang kimchi ripened in Dimchae all winter. Six months later, 97 out of 100 households bought a Dimchae.

It sold 20,000 units the next year and more than 500,000 four years later. Today nine in ten homes have a kimchi refrigerator; more than 20 companies make them, and over 1 million are sold every year. The backyard kimchi jar moved into the apartment kitchen, and the name Dimchae became the word for a kimchi refrigerator.

Worth adding: the households that used it for six months could buy it at half price. Today's kimchi refrigerators hold not only kimchi but also rice, fruit, meat, and alcohol.

The reason to buy a fridge for kimchi could not be known before tasting it.
Dimchae let people try it instead of explaining, and won the market on taste alone.