[Photo Booth Industry] Passing the Growth Baton: How a Korean Franchisor Shifted Its Energy from Plan.B Studio to PHOTO OBJET

Summary

This article examines ㈜리오컴퍼니, a small Korean franchise headquarters with roughly five employees, and its two brands: Plan.B Studio and PHOTO OBJET. Plan.B began in February 2022, emphasizing distinctive lighting technology designed by photographer 황영철. Its store-opening announcements peaked at 70 in 2023. PHOTO OBJET launched in 2025 and grew sixfold, from four stores to 24; nine of those stores were complete renovations of existing Plan.B locations. The two brands define their products in fundamentally different ways: Plan.B sells lighting know-how, while PHOTO OBJET relies on aquariums and a customizable photo-retouching system, with two patents already granted. Its unmanned-store franchise package promises “zero staffing costs, 24-hour operation, and the ability to operate multiple stores,” targeting people seeking a side business or multiple income streams. The Taiwan operation uses a master franchise model, with 16 stores grouped around four owners.

Key facts

• Plan.B, with 136 stores, stopped publishing store-opening announcements after May 2025. Over the same period, PHOTO OBJET grew from four stores to 24, including nine locations rebranded at the same address.
• PHOTO OBJET’s 성都점 recorded monthly revenue of ₩68,460,000 in October 2024, with staffing costs at 0%, royalties at 7%, and an advertised owner-income rate of 85%, excluding rent and utilities; this is not a net profit margin.
• The operating models in Korea and Taiwan differ substantially. Korean locations concentrate on university shopping districts, with at least 17 stores bearing university names. Taiwan’s stores are spread across nine cities and counties, covering university districts, shopping areas, and tourist destinations.
• Taiwan’s 16 stores group around four main franchise owners: 王思錡 with five stores, 鄭竤晅 with three, 何箴亞 with two, and 劉惠敏／王逸麟 with two. The registered operators of the remaining four locations were not identified.

This is the third article in my research series on Korean photo booth companies. The first two examined “small businesses within large companies”: PHOTOGRAY is backed by APR, a listed beauty group with a market capitalization of ₩13 trillion, while PHOTOISM is backed by 서북, which raised ₩16 billion and was pursuing an IPO.

This one is different. Its subject is a Korean franchise headquarters that is unlisted, has no venture capital backing, and employs roughly five people: ㈜리오컴퍼니 (Rio Company). It operates two brands: Plan.B Studio (플랜비스튜디오) and PHOTO OBJET (포토오브제).

In 2025, it made a very clear handoff of the growth baton.

The original Chinese article was published on August 8, 2026, based on the Plan.B Studio company research and investigation of PHOTO OBJET’s Taiwan operation completed on August 6, 2026. A cover image was added on September 16, 2026; the October 12, 2026 revision only corrected the Chinese summary’s qualification of the advertised 85% owner-income rate. The figures and company information below retain that historical research snapshot.

(All figures below carry verification dates and sources. Korean won amounts retain their original ₩／원 values, without currency conversion.)

1. First, establish that they are the same company

Many people assume Plan.B Studio and PHOTO OBJET are competing brands. They are two product lines operated by the same franchise headquarters.

The evidence comes directly from the “FAMILY BRAND” section in the footer of PHOTO OBJET’s official website, which explicitly lists “플랜비 스튜디오.” The same footer clearly identifies the headquarters:

There are two additional technical clues. The visitor analytics script on Plan.B’s website is hosted at leo793.weblog.cafe24.com, using the same handle as the headquarters’ marketing email, leo793@naver.com. PHOTO OBJET’s website also directly includes planbstudio.co.kr among its external links.

⚠️ There is a research trap worth flagging here. Another Korean company called “리오컴퍼니” uses the domain riocompany.co.kr, has business registration number 517-12-01631 (-12- denotes a sole proprietor), and is represented by 김덕중. It operates in sports management and e-commerce and has no connection to Plan.B. During verification, I encountered search snippets incorrectly attaching “Representative 김덕중” to Plan.B. Always identify the operator using 조대원／536-88-00166 in the official website footer.

Plan.B Studio began in February 2022. A February 16, 2022 report in the Korean publication 시사매거진 was specific: “franchise specialist 리오컴퍼니” partnered with photographer 황영철 (黃永哲) to launch PLAN.B STUDIO. The photographer, who had shot portraits of numerous celebrities, designed the lighting and dedicated photography equipment. The first three stores opened together—한양대점, 부천대점, and 구리돌다리점—and approximately ten franchise stores had already signed contracts at launch.

That is the origin of the official website’s claim, “업계 최초 독보적 조명기술력”—“the industry’s first distinctive lighting technology.” What it sold at the outset was lighting.

2. Passing the growth baton: Three signals that line up

Signal one: Plan.B’s store-opening announcements stopped for 15 months

On August 6, 2026, I counted the entries in the store directory on Plan.B’s Korean website, page by page, across 23 pages. After removing duplicates, the total was 136 stores. Its [GRAND OPEN] posts in the announcements section broke down by year as follows:

Two limitations must accompany any use of this curve:

1. An announcement date is not an opening date. Announcements often appear after the actual opening: the batch published on May 2, 2025 explicitly says “Opened in April” in the post text.
2. Stores opened before August 2022 are absent from the announcements section. The first three appear only in the February 2022 media report.

The accurate statement is therefore that Plan.B’s Korean website stopped publishing store-opening announcements for 15 months after May 2025. I would not write “no new stores opened for 15 months.” An absence of announcements does not establish an absence of openings; those are very different levels of evidence.

Even with those limitations, the curve is a strong signal. When a franchise headquarters stops announcing new stores on its own website, it usually indicates a change in franchise recruitment momentum.

Signal two: Over the same period, PHOTO OBJET grew from four stores to 24

In Korean media reports from January 2025, PHOTO OBJET had four stores: 성수, 홍대, 대구 동성로, and 포항. My store-by-store verification of its official website on August 6, 2026 found 24.

One side stopped; the other grew sixfold. The baton had been passed.

Signal three: Existing Korean Plan.B stores were also changing brands

This is the most direct signal. Of PHOTO OBJET’s 24 stores, nine had exactly the same addresses as Plan.B locations. In the official press release for 연남2호점, the headquarters itself wrote:

“The newly opened PHOTO OBJET 연남2호점 is a space created through a complete renovation of the existing ‘Plan.B Studio 연남2호점’…”

The same release quoted a customer saying:

“Compared with its days as Plan.B Studio, the space has become much more stylish.”

“전면 리뉴얼” means a complete renovation and rebranding, rather than merely adding a new shooting booth inside an existing store.

⚠️ The 37.5% figure (9/24) needs interpretation to avoid misleading readers. It does not mean “one-third of PHOTO OBJET’s stores were inherited, so its growth is inflated.” It means the headquarters chose the most cash-efficient expansion route. Existing franchisees did not need to find new sites or sign new leases, while the headquarters received another round of equipment payments and royalties. For a headquarters with roughly five employees and no venture capital backing, selling a second time to franchisees who already trust you before approaching new customers is the most reasonable approach. The other side also matters: these nine stores were not net additions to the location count, so the group’s physical coverage grew less than the brand’s store count suggests.

3. Why switch? The two brands sell fundamentally different things

This is the key to understanding the whole story. The difference between Plan.B and PHOTO OBJET goes beyond a new logo: it is a new definition of the product.

Korean media described PHOTO OBJET’s positioning in a sentence I consider particularly precise:

“Unlike photo booths that provide backgrounds through virtual reality and similar methods, it recreates actual physical spaces to maximize immersion during the shoot.”

That is the business reason for switching brands.

The lighting know-how and concept-set designs sold by Plan.B have a fatal weakness: they cannot be registered for protection. Any competitor can build an elevator set and catch up, leaving you with no legal tool to stop it.

AQUA is different. In 2025, the headquarters filed a whole package of intellectual property around the aquarium, and it had already obtained the following patents:

There were also nine design applications, including 30-2025-0001560, all with 2025 application numbers.

The real substance of the “baton handoff” is therefore a shift from differentiation based on first-mover advantage to differentiation based on intellectual property rights. For a headquarters without capital to burn, that is the only moat it can build.

The second patent also deserves separate attention: it covers a retouching system, on the software side. Physical sets are difficult to roll out internationally because they must be rebuilt in every country. Software does not face that same constraint. Over the long term, this line is more worth watching than the aquarium.

4. The economics of unmanned stores: The headquarters publishes the numbers itself

I consider this the most valuable part of the article because it reveals the actual structure of the business of selling franchise packages. These are not my calculations; the Korean franchise recruitment page publishes the figures itself.

First, the format. PHOTO OBJET’s recruitment page lists four points under “창업 경쟁력,” or “Advantages for starting a business”:

1. 인건비 100% ZERO: zero staffing costs.
2. 24시간 무인 운영: 24-hour unmanned operation.
3. 다점포 운영 가능: the ability to operate multiple stores, targeting people running a business part-time or pursuing multiple income streams.
4. 하루 30분 쉬운 매장관리: easy store management in 30 minutes a day, covering machine checks, basic tidying, and cleaning.

“Studio,” then, describes the setting rather than a service. There is no photographer and no store employee. It is a fully unmanned, 24-hour self-service store. I want to make this correction explicit because the word “studio” can easily suggest that someone is there to serve customers.

Next are the opening costs. The official tiered table includes the franchise fee, training, fit-out, KIOSK, DID, a banknote-to-coin changer, and small promotional items. Concept-set costs are additional.

Finally, there is a single-store revenue sample. The official featured example is 성수연무장길점 in October 2024:

These figures must be read with three qualifications. Omitting any one of them would be misleading:

• (a) This is the recruitment page’s best-case example, not an average. 성수점 is the flagship and demonstration store in the headquarters’ home area. Korean media reported more than 400 visitors on weekdays, more than 700 on weekends, and queues exceeding three hours during peak season. Treating it as “what you will earn simply by opening a store” is dangerous.
• (b) The 85% is not a net profit margin. It excludes rent and utility charges, which are two of the largest fixed costs of a physical store. “수익률 85%,” or “an advertised 85% owner-income rate,” is a common sales formulation in Korean franchise recruitment, rather than net profit in the financial sense.
• (c) These are PHOTO OBJET’s figures, not Plan.B Studio’s. The FRANCHISE page on Plan.B’s website is an image-only layout produced with Adobe Muse. Its text could not be extracted, and I could not establish its opening costs.

Even with all three qualifications attached, the numbers answer a key question: this business sells “a second income with low management costs.” The four claims—“zero staffing costs,” “85% owner-income rate,” “multiple stores possible,” and “30 minutes a day”—target salaried workers seeking a side business, rather than entrepreneurs looking to run a shop.

That also explains why it can grow quickly: it does not need to establish every location itself. It only needs to sell the franchise package.

5. Site-selection logic: University districts and tourist towns, rather than metro-station shopping areas

This is another clear playbook used by the headquarters, with a similar pattern in Korea and Taiwan.

Of the 136 Korean stores, at least 17 have university names directly in their store names: 경희대, 고대안암, 한양대, 부산대, 인하대, 영남대, 순천향대, 호서대, 울산대, 부산경성대, 마산경남대, 진주경상대, 수원성균관대, 숙대입구, 성신여대, 부천대, and 부산동아대. Two of the first three stores were university locations: 한양대 and 부천대.

Its reach into outlying markets is even more striking: 백령도점 is on Baengnyeong Island, Korea’s northernmost offshore island in the West Sea. There is also CGV인천구월점, its only store inside a cinema.

I classified the 16 Taiwan locations by setting:

The difference is clear when compared with PHOTOISM’s Taiwan approach of “metro-station exits plus the Eslite channel.” Plan.B Taiwan prioritizes university shopping districts and tourist towns and spans nine cities and counties. It has the broadest geographic spread among Korean-style photo booth brands in Taiwan, yet no clear distribution-channel strategy is apparent.

That is characteristic of franchisees selecting their own sites: the stores go wherever franchisees can afford the floor space.

6. A firsthand finding in Taiwan: Those 16 locations actually group around four owners

This was the most labor-intensive part of my verification, and something entirely absent from the Chinese-language web.

I checked the addresses of all 16 Plan.B Taiwan stores against the nationwide Ministry of Finance “Business (Tax) Registration Dataset”—the August 6, 2026 version, with 1.71 million records—and the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ public business registration records. A match required both an exact address match and a photography-related industry classification.

I identified registered operators for 12 of the 16 locations, grouped into four owner clusters:

That works out to an average of three stores per owner group. It also explains why the “multiple stores possible” recruitment pitch in Section 4 is effective: an unmanned format gives the same franchisee the confidence to open a second, third, and fourth store.

⚠️ Of the four stores for which no registration was found, Xinyi ATT and Park2 Caowu Square are inside shopping complexes. It is normal for tenants in such complexes not to register each location separately; this is not a missing-data issue.

Hard evidence: 思元有限公司

The strongest evidence connecting this operation to Plan.B comes from the Bureau of Foreign Trade. The English name in the importer/exporter registration for 思元有限公司, business identification number 94112990, is exactly:

PLAN. B KOREAN SELF PHOTO LTD.

Its accompanying registration information lists total capital of NT$600,000, establishment approved on May 10, 2023, and a registered address at the Plan.B Ximen store itself: No. 1-1, Chengdu Road, Wanhua District, Taipei. The directors and supervisors list contains only one person—director 王思錡, with 100% of the contributed capital—and both import and export qualifications are marked “Yes.” This fits the operating need to import machines and concept sets from Korea.

The same 王思錡 also has 大發韓式拍貼工作室, a sole proprietorship with business identification number 88357270, approved for establishment on March 15, 2023. Following a registration change on January 8, 2025, its address became the same as that of 思元有限公司: No. 1-1, Chengdu Road, Wanhua District, Taipei. The two entities had formally converged at the registration level, confirming that they belonged to the same group of people.

What is the relationship between Korea and Taiwan? Master franchise

The route itself is public. The title of a March 27, 2023 announcement on Plan.B’s Korean website reads:

[Notice] Master franchise agreements for Vietnam and Taiwan
Original title: [공지사항] 베트남,대만 마스터프랜차이즈 계약

“대만” means Taiwan, and “마스터프랜차이즈” means master franchise. This was the Korean headquarters publicly announcing an agreement with Taiwan on its own website, dated March 27, 2023. The first Taiwan entity, 大發韓式拍貼工作室, had its establishment approved on March 15, 2023, 12 days before the announcement.

The conclusion is clear: the Taiwan operation consists of Taiwanese operators holding a license. It is neither a directly operated Korean subsidiary nor a single agency.

Two pieces of evidence appear in government registrations. First, the shareholder lists of 思元有限公司, 竤宇國際有限公司, and 耀箴國際有限公司 contain no Korean legal entities or individuals. Second, their capital is only NT$500,000–600,000. That is the scale of individual entrepreneurship rather than a multinational subsidiary.

Taiwan’s fifth owner comes from the other brand

PHOTO OBJET currently has two Taiwan stores: Taipei Zhongshan, at No. 8-2, Lane 18, Nanjing West Road, Datong District, Taipei; and Taichung Yizhong, at No. 58, Yizhong Street, North District, Taichung.

The Taichung Yizhong store belongs to 王思錡: it is the Taichung operating location of 思元有限公司, with tax registration dated April 17, 2025. The Zhongshan store does not. Its registered entity is 大嘟嘟商行, business identification number 00611322, a sole proprietorship with capital of NT$35,000 and establishment approved on September 2, 2025. Its responsible person is 蔡承佑. This is the fifth owner in the Taiwan system.

⚠️ Another business registration, for 承心食品實業有限公司, lists a representative with the same name, 蔡承佑. Whether they are the same person has not been verified, so I do not combine them into one identity.

🔴 Taiwan has not followed Korea’s rebranding model

This needs to be explicit because it is easy to draw the wrong inference. The nine same-address Korean stores were complete conversions from Plan.B to PHOTO OBJET. Both Taiwan Objet stores are independent locations at new street addresses. Neither is an installation added at the same address nor a rebranding.

There are three independent pieces of evidence:

The two nearby Plan.B stores are also still operating.

⇒ Taiwan is opening a second brand within the same shopping district, rather than replacing Plan.B with Objet. For Zhongshan and Yizhong, this means the same system has placed two stores offering two products along the same local shopping streets. Competition at the individual-store level is denser than the store-count table suggests.

7. Its position in the field: Fourth by store count, but not a small brand

Here are the four Korean brands verified on the same date:

⚠️ This table needs interpretation. Ranking fourth with 136 stores does not make it a “small brand.” The leading tier in Korea’s self-service photo studio market is at the 400-plus-store level. With 136 stores, Plan.B is already just below the top tier and at the head of the second tier. The real gap lies in capital structure rather than store count.

The companies ahead of it have stories to tell: APR is a listed company with a market capitalization of ₩13 trillion, and 서북 raised ₩16 billion while pursuing an IPO. The ㈜리오컴퍼니 operation has no comparable capital story:

• DART, Korea’s electronic disclosure system, had no annual business report or audit report on file. It is an unlisted small or medium-sized enterprise without an external audit obligation.
• Neither THE VC nor 혁신의숲 showed any investment record: no venture capital rounds, valuation, or investor list.
• Its only public financial information was the single-store revenue sample on the franchise recruitment page. There were no company-level revenue or profit-and-loss figures.
• saramin previously listed “(주)리오컴퍼니: five employees in 2022.” This suggests a roughly five-person operation, but it was not confirmed by a primary source and serves only as a scale reference.
• The combined stated capital of the eight registered entities on the Taiwan side was less than NT$2.2 million.

This is the most interesting of the four precisely because it lacks money. It demonstrates that, in this market, packaging differentiation into a business-startup product that people will buy can allow a five-person company to reach 136 stores and expand into Taiwan and Vietnam.

The cost of that route is also clear: when the product stops selling, there is no capital cushion to sustain you. You have to switch to another product. That is what happened in the 2025 baton handoff.

As an aside, Japan offers the opposite extreme: FURYU is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and follows a capital-intensive model of manufacturing its own machines and establishing its own locations. In the same product category, Korea follows an asset-light franchise model, while Japan follows an asset-heavy manufacturing model. That structural difference deserves separate attention.

8. What I could not establish: An honest list

One of the greatest research risks is turning “I did not find it” into “it does not exist.” I explicitly mark the following questions as unresolved:

🔴 A necessary calibration: Registration dates are not opening dates

In these cases, registration came after opening. I found two concrete counterexamples:

• Ximen Flagship: a blog was already describing the “newly opened Ximen flagship store” on June 21, 2024, but the northern operating location’s tax-registration establishment date was November 18, 2024—a lag of approximately five months.
• Taichung Yizhong: a blog had already published a firsthand visit on July 10, 2024, but 宇宇商行’s registration date was September 18, 2024—a lag of approximately two months.

The cluster of registrations from November to December 2024—northern location, Dunnan, Taoyuan, Luodong, and Zhongshan, five records within six weeks—therefore represents tax registrations and compliance housekeeping for existing stores rather than a burst of store openings.

I spell this out because those five dates, placed together, look remarkably like an attractive growth curve. Using them to chart opening speed would be wrong. Anyone tempted to build a time series directly from Taiwan’s business registration data can fall into this trap.

9. Further reading

• The other two articles from the same research series: The Original, Frozen, and Rebooted: A Company Study of PHOTOGRAY and Its Parent APR, and The Market Leader Was Losing Money Last Year: A Financial Statement Study of PHOTOISM’s Parent 서북.
• The Japanese comparison: A Leading Player Dominating Japan’s Photo Booth Market: An Introduction to Tokyo Stock Exchange–Listed FURYU.
• How this industry developed in Taiwan: A Report on the History of Taiwan’s Photo Booth and Korean-Style Photo Booth Industries.
• Market changes over the preceding full year: 2025 Annual Review of Taiwan’s Photo Booth Industry.
• I have compiled these two brands’ stores, addresses, and opening hours on my photo booth information site: Plan.B Studio store finder and PHOTO OBJET store finder.
• How to find machines and use them while in Korea: Guide to Photo Booths in Korea.

Sources

Primary sources: Brand websites and official announcements

• Plan.B Studio’s Korean website — Homepage slogans, navigation menu, and franchise inquiry hotline 1577-4392.
• Plan.B’s official store directory — Counted page by page across 23 pages; 136 entries after deduplication, verified August 6, 2026.
• Plan.B’s official announcements section — 139 posts. The key announcement is the March 27, 2023 “[Notice] Master franchise agreements for Vietnam and Taiwan” ([공지사항] 베트남,대만 마스터프랜차이즈 계약); 136 [GRAND OPEN] posts were used for the growth curve.
• PHOTO OBJET’s official website — The ㈜리오컴퍼니 footer identifying 조대원, 536-88-00166, and FAMILY BRAND 플랜비 스튜디오; the four “Advantages for starting a business” points on its franchise recruitment page; the opening-cost tiers; the monthly revenue breakdown for 성수연무장길점; AQUA patent and design application numbers; and individual pages for 24 stores.
• Google Patents — KR102801099B1, filed January 13, 2025 and granted April 29, 2025; KR102826651B1, filed November 26, 2024 and granted June 27, 2025. Both rights holders are (주)리오컴퍼니.

Primary sources: Government registrations

• Ministry of Finance nationwide Business (Tax) Registration Dataset — August 6, 2026 version, containing 1,710,562 records; used to match all 16 Taiwan store addresses individually.
• Ministry of Economic Affairs public business registration inquiry service — Director and supervisor lists and capital contributions for 思元有限公司, 竤宇國際有限公司, and 耀箴國際有限公司; responsible persons and capital amounts for 大發韓式拍貼工作室, 宇宇商行, the two 惠順企業社 entities, and 大嘟嘟商行.
• 台灣公司網 — 思元有限公司 — Bureau of Foreign Trade English name “PLAN. B KOREAN SELF PHOTO LTD.,” four operating locations, and zero trademark registrations.
• Taiwan Intellectual Property Office trademark search system — All fields for PHOTOOBJET registration 02403442.

Secondary sources: Media

• 시사매거진, “Plan.B Studio Launches Self-Service Photo Studio Brand,” February 16, 2022 — 리오컴퍼니’s partnership with 황영철; the first three stores; 24-hour unmanned operation using IoT and CCTV; and approximately ten stores already under contract.
• 경상일보 — Third-generation kiosks. A separate article, “Surpasses 150 Domestic and Overseas Franchise Stores,” was republished in the official website’s news section.
• Businesskorea, republished in PHOTO OBJET’s official website press section — The exact wording of the official press release describing the “complete renovation” of 연남2호점.
• FETV, January 6, 2025 — PHOTO OBJET’s brand positioning, 성수점’s performance, and the four stores operating at the time.
• FindCompany trademark index — The PHOTOOBJET trademark applicant. 🟡 Secondary source; see item 3 in Section 8.