[Life Act 3 Companies] 'Mintway' Enhancing Elderly Cognitive Ability with Fragrance

"Making Old Age More Beautiful"
Mintway CEO Io-sang Lee

CEO Lee Osang of Mintway is showing scented paint and a water brush used in a painting education program for elderly people with mild cognitive impairment or early dementia. Photo by Younghan Heo younghan@

Social Campus 'On Seoul' in Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul, is a space where various social enterprise startup entrepreneurs gather closely. The light passing through the large glass windows warmly embraced their small base. There, on the 17th, I met Lee Osang, CEO of Mintway (40), who has cherished the dream of being a social entrepreneur solving social problems since his early career days.

Mintway is a preliminary social enterprise with the catchphrase "Making old age more honorable, making old age more beautiful." It was certified as a preliminary social enterprise by the Ministry of Employment and Labor in December 2021. It provides various programs and content for beautiful aging. CEO Lee explained, "Our social mission is to help the elderly have beautiful and healthy inner and outer well-being." Especially, Mintway's core content is 'scent.' They create educational materials and programs that use beautiful scents to enhance the cognitive abilities of the elderly.

Before starting the business, CEO Lee participated in cultural and artistic enjoyment projects for the elderly at a 'Youth Culture and Arts Company,' which sparked his interest in elderly issues. The project involved various artistic activities across island villages categorized as culturally marginalized areas. While conducting several educational programs on 35 islands in the Jeolla region, he frequently met elderly people. Naturally, he began to think about 'aging' and life in old age. Having long wanted to start a social enterprise himself, he began exploring business ideas and directions.

Later, after graduating from KAIST's Social Entrepreneur MBA program, he learned about concrete business and management. He said, "I don't want to run a social enterprise for some grand reason. I just thought it was meaningful to solve social problems or help those I care about through profitable methods." During his career, he witnessed many elderly people suffering from dementia. He said, "Dementia is a disease that comes naturally with aging, but it makes families struggle together," and "I wanted to help find ways to make life happier and less painful even when experiencing dementia."

- What kind of company is Mintway?

▲ In short, it is a preliminary social enterprise designing the health and beauty of seniors. It creates scent-based educational content for elderly people with mild cognitive impairment and early dementia. Simply put, they make supplementary teaching materials and programs.

- What kind of educational supplementary materials and programs are there for elderly people in the pre-dementia or early dementia stages?

▲ A representative example is the 'Beauty Therapy Class.' It was conducted at a daycare center (senior day care center), one of the home welfare facilities. The daycare center is like a kindergarten for elderly people with mild cognitive impairment such as dementia. The program was for seniors using long-term care services and received a good response. It was a class program that included blood clot management massage using aroma oils.

- Does the massage program mean teaching how to give massages?

▲ The program is conducted in a way that participants press acupressure points themselves following the instructor's lecture. Not only dementia patients but also their family members living with them participated in the program. Like meridian massage, they press various acupressure points themselves to give massages for themselves. Since family members caring for dementia patients experience considerable stress, this program was designed and conducted to help relieve headaches and other symptoms.

- What other programs are there?

▲ Besides Beauty Therapy, there are Silver Beauty Therapy, Circle Ballet, and Scent Art Museum programs. As of last year, these programs were conducted at four dementia safety centers and five daycare centers. The Beauty Therapy and Silver Beauty Therapy programs allow participants to apply cosmetics themselves, combined with massage and rhythmic gymnastics. Circle Ballet is a rhythmic program composed of easy and gentle ballet movements. The Scent Art Museum program is a painting class enhanced with scents. It uses materials like paints infused with scents to stimulate the olfactory senses of dementia patients and evoke various memories.

- A museum program using scents sounds fresh.

▲ Especially, welfare workers responded very positively to the Scent Art Museum programs. When conducting simple painting programs, elderly participants often have difficulty concentrating. However, many elderly people tend to participate until the end in art programs using scents. The classes use our materials that add scents to ordinary paints. For example, when drawing a child, adding a 'baby powder' scent often helps participants remember their children's names. Their faces brighten as they express feelings evoked by recalling memories. We believe that scents stimulate the olfactory senses and help improve cognitive abilities in the elderly.

- Can these programs be seen as a business model providing various elderly-related institutions with educational content?

▲ Yes. However, as mentioned earlier, we also produce teaching aids ourselves. We make kits, with the 'Scent Playground' used in the Scent Art Museum program being a representative example. It is a program where participants can experience making perfume without going to a perfume workshop. Anyone can participate, not just dementia patients. It is a kind of play that selects and blends six scents with low aversion. Each scent functions independently as a perfume product, but through blending, participants can create their own unique scent. We also provide these kits for classes. The classes offer 20 to 30 scents, and we provide videos to facilitate cognitive enhancement lessons.

- Are there other supplementary materials?

▲ There is a Scent Art Museum kit produced while conducting the Scent Art Museum program. It involves adding small amounts of unique scented materials so that brushes emit scents. The idea is to allow participants to smell the scent while painting with solid paints dissolved in water. These teaching materials are also sold directly to consumers through a smart store. We produce these kits in partnership with professional perfumers.

- What is Mintway's vision?

▲ We don't want to stop at just creating educational programs and content. We plan to expand direct contact points with customers. We believe the best customers are dementia patients and the caregivers close to them. Therefore, we are establishing a space in Daejeon for a caregiver community. It is a space and center where caregivers can manage stress and share difficulties. Caregivers are the most important 'players' in elderly welfare services. We believe that if they are happy, dementia patients and their families can be happier too. From a business perspective, these caregivers could become distribution channels. Therefore, we are preparing to open a space where they can comfortably visit, receive education, and chat.