Background
Karl Müller was born in Roggwil in the canton of Thurgau, Switzerland, in 1952. After finishing his studies in Mechanical Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, he moved to South Korea in 1979. He studied at the Seoul National University on a scholarship . Seven months after Müller began his studies, Park Chung-hee, then president of South Korea, was assassinated and universities were closed due to mass demonstrations.

Discovering his entrepreneurial spirit
This incident forced Müller to search for a job in Korea in 1980. He found a gap in the market and founded his first company, a supplier of Swiss specialties to hotels. He established 12 companies in Korea in the following years. He opened up restaurants, sold textile machines and became the first retailer to import skiing equipment to Korea. Everything he put his hand to became a huge financial success.

Highs and lows
The price of all his success had a serious side effect and ultimately let to a burnout.  He sold all of his companies in 1990 and returned to Lake Constance in Switzerland in order to recover his health. He bought a farm and became self-sufficient for 10 years. During this time, he founded a private rehabilitation centre for drug addicts as a non-profit organisation. However, he ran out of money after three years and began to work as a driver at weekly markets.

The founding of MBT
In the 80s Karl Müller lived in a mud house in the middle of the paddy fields of Korea where he discovered the positive effects of clay soil. The soil in paddy fields becomes elastic and springy once the water drains out, making it very comfortable to stand and walk on. Karl Müller spent many years researching how to implement this paddy field sensation in our modern everyday lives.

Müller then introduced the MBT shoe to the market in 1997, revolutionising the shoe industry with the ‘rollover sole’. The rollover shoe proved to have therapeutic effects, and is now copied by over 100 shoe manufacturers worldwide.

From MBT to kybun
Karl Müller continued to research ways of imitating the pleasant rice field feeling more effectively. This led him to invent the elastic, springy sole and he names the Brand of this new sole concept "kybun", which in Korean means «well-being».  In 2007, he founded the company kybun AG and begins with the development and industrialization of kybun shoes (which were first sold under the name "kyBoot") and other elastic, springy products such as mats, treadmills and cushions.

kybun movement concept
The kybun shoe is a part of the kybun movement concept, which also includes the elastic, springy kybun mat and the kybun treadmill.

Swiss newspaper SonntagsZeitung has named Karl Müller one of the most innovative entrepreneurs in Switzerland, and declared that he is making design history.