Taking K-Beauty Global
The Beauty Platform the World Turns To
CJ Olive Young

Setting a New Standard for Beauty Retail in Korea

When Olive Young opened its first store in Sinsa-dong, Seoul, in November 1999, it introduced a format that was unfamiliar in Korea. At a time when consumers bought health products, cosmetics, and household goods at different types of stores, Olive Young introduced the new “drugstore” model, combining the functions of a pharmacy and a retail store.
However, establishing the new business model was not easy. Opposition from the pharmacy industry and regulatory hurdles threatened Olive Young's survival. Rather than sticking to its original model, it shifted away from the pharmaceutical-focused drugstore concept centered on medicines and transformed itself into a Health & Beauty (H&B) store offering both health and beauty products. Beginning in 2008, it focused in particular on women in their 20s and 30s as its core customers and strengthened its cosmetics offering. Unlike conventional single-brand cosmetics stores, Olive Young created a space where consumers could compare and discover a wide range of Korean and international brands. This approach helped create a new retail market in Korea centered on the H&B store model.
Once the market was established, Olive Young expanded its role by shaping new demand in the beauty market. Examples include “clean beauty,” which emphasizes sustainability through vegan and environmentally friendly products; “slow aging,” which focuses on a healthy approach to aging; and “W Care,” which offers specialized products for women’s health. Its curation expertise—the ability to turn changing consumer interests into distinct categories and discover suitable products and brands—has become one of Olive Young’s key competitive strengths.

Growing the K-Beauty Ecosystem Together

Olive Young’s growth has been closely linked to that of smaller and emerging brands. Around 2010, as major cosmetics companies began focusing more heavily on their own brands and single-brand stores, Olive Young faced challenges in securing products. The company turned its attention to small and medium-sized beauty brands that had strong products but lacked distribution networks and marketing capabilities, seeing an opportunity to grow alongside them.
What began as a response to a business challenge eventually became one of Olive Young’s distinctive strengths: discovering smaller and emerging brands and growing together with them. Drawing on customer data and market experience, Olive Young developed a system to identify promising brands and support them throughout their growth, from product planning and category development to curation and marketing. As of 2024, approximately 2,400 small and medium-sized brands worked with Olive Young, accounting for 89% of all brands carried by the company. More than 100 brands have achieved annual sales of more than KRW 10 billion through Olive Young. Last year, Olive Young helped six brands surpass KRW 100 billion in annual sales through its channels, while one brand exceeded KRW 200 billion for the first time. Olive Young continues to help create new brand success stories every year. The “KRW 10 Billion Brand Road” at Olive Young N Seongsu, an innovative store in Seongsu-dong, Seoul, symbolizes this history of shared growth.
This commitment to shared growth is also extending to local communities. Olive Young is expanding its network of large-format stores and its logistics infrastructure in major commercial areas outside the Seoul metropolitan region and launching limited-edition products in Jeju, Gangneung, Busan, and other areas that incorporate local ingredients and cultural characteristics. As foreign tourists increasingly travel beyond Seoul, Olive Young is using local stores to connect tourism with consumption.

Breaking Down the Online-Offline Divide

“Oneul Dream,” launched in late 2018, marked another transformation for Olive Young. The company introduced the beauty industry’s first rapid delivery service using an online-to-offline (O2O) model, connecting online orders with nearby physical stores. The strategy became even more effective during the COVID-19 pandemic. While retailers were scaling back their physical stores, Olive Young used its nationwide store network not simply as a group of sales outlets, but also as logistics hubs for online delivery and spaces where customers could experience brands.
The role of its physical stores also evolved. Rather than serving simply as places to purchase products, they became spaces where customers could experience products and brands directly through personal color analysis, skin and scalp assessments, and makeup demonstrations. Olive Young has also strengthened its store strategy by tailoring product assortments and in-store experiences to the characteristics of each store's local market and customer base.

A Gateway Connecting K-Beauty with the World

For international visitors to Korea, Olive Young has become one of the leading places to discover and experience K-beauty firsthand. Eight out of 10 foreign tourists visiting Korea experience K-beauty at an Olive Young store,* and as visitors increasingly venture beyond major tourist areas in Seoul to places such as Jeju and Busan, Olive Young has established itself as a “must-visit K-beauty destination” for travelers to Korea. The experience has also been extended to the “Olive Young Global Mall,” which is available in more than 150 countries worldwide. As of December 2025, more than 1,380 brands were available on the platform, which has grown into a cross-border marketplace connecting Korean brands with consumers around the world.
Olive Young’s global business is now expanding into local markets. After opening its first U.S. physical store in Pasadena, California, in May 2026 and establishing a dedicated U.S. online store and logistics infrastructure, Olive Young also launched “Olive Young K-Beauty Edit” in approximately 580 Sephora stores across the United States. The strategy combines its own stores, where consumers can explore K-beauty in depth, with Sephora’s distribution network to reach a broader consumer base. Building on its expertise in discovering and curating brands in Korea, Olive Young is also expanding routes to overseas markets for smaller and independent K-beauty brands.

• * Source: CJ Olive Young 2025 Impact Report

Beyond K-Beauty: Olive Young’s Next Step Into K-Wellness

Olive Young’s expansion is not limited to K-beauty. It has broadened the “health” side of its original H&B business into wellness as a whole, launching a new curation platform, “OLIVE BETTER.” The platform brings together wellness products and solutions spanning everyday life, including functional foods, diet, “beauty from within,” sleep, and aromatherapy. Olive Young is applying the data, curation expertise, and experiential retail capabilities it has accumulated in the beauty market to a new area.
Since pioneering a new retail market in 1999, Olive Young has helped grow the K-beauty market by connecting brands with consumers. Now, it is extending those competitive strengths into global markets and the wellness sector, helping K-beauty realize its potential worldwide while opening up a new K-lifestyle market.