“안녕하세요. 웰컴 투 올리브영.” On June 13, that Korean-English greeting rang out inside Westfield Century City, one of Los Angeles’s busiest shopping malls, every time a customer walked through the door. It was opening day for Olive Young’s second U.S. store, and despite this one being tucked inside a mall rather than standing alone, roughly 300 people had already lined up before the doors opened, according to Yonhap correspondent Kim Kyung-yoon’s June 13 dispatch from the scene.
Rebecca Baek, who got in line at 4 a.m., told Yonhap she’d come to buy products for her mother — she’d never actually shopped at an Olive Young in Korea, she said, but wanted to see what the fuss was about now that she didn’t have to. LA city councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky showed up to deliver opening remarks, calling the timing fitting: “As K-beauty continues to influence trends around the world, it makes sense for Olive Young’s expansion to happen here, in one of LA’s premier shopping destinations,” she said, framing the opening as a marker of cultural exchange between the city and Korea.
What made the turnout notable wasn’t just the number — it was that this was the second time it had happened in barely two weeks. Olive Young’s first U.S. store, a standalone flagship in Pasadena, opened May 29 to a line that stretched four city blocks. Per Cosin Korea reporter Kil Tae-yoon’s June 14 report, the two stores are deliberately built for different jobs: Pasadena is a flagship aimed at the 20-and-30-somethings who already track K-beauty and want an in-person extension of a brand they already follow online, while the 250-square-meter Century City location is what the company calls a “확산형” — a spreading-exposure store, dropped into a mall anchored by Macy’s, Nordstrom, a movie theater and grocery stores, just five to ten minutes from Beverly Hills and Rodeo Drive, with Bel Air, Brentwood and Westwood within a 10-kilometer radius.
Inside, the Century City store devotes roughly 1.5 times the skincare shelf space of Olive Young’s standard format, anchored by a “Boost & Glow Bar” for serums and essences and a “Prep Bar” for toner pads and sun care, plus a dedicated beauty-device area and a free “Skin Scan” service for members. Store manager Saul Martinez put the pitch to Yonhap in blunt terms: think about American shoppers who’ve spent 14 hours flying to Korea and filled an entire suitcase with skincare just to bring home — “now there’s a destination for that here, without the flight.”
The timing isn’t incidental. Korean cosmetics exports hit $2.18 billion in the first quarter of 2026, up 21.3% year over year and a quarterly record, with small and mid-sized exporters alone posting $4.09 billion through May, up 28.6%, as the U.S. and Europe overtake China as Korean beauty’s top destination markets. Two opening-day lines in two weeks, in two very different parts of the same metro area, is Olive Young betting that American demand for K-beauty isn’t a pandemic-era spike fading on schedule, but something durable enough to build a multi-store, multi-neighborhood retail footprint around.
Whether that bet holds will say more about markets far from Los Angeles than about LA itself. Pasadena and Century City both sit in a metro area with an outsized, K-content-fluent shopper base and a large Korean-American community to begin with — exactly the conditions most likely to produce a 4 a.m. line regardless of how the brand is positioned. The real test of Olive Young’s U.S. strategy starts whenever it opens its third store somewhere that doesn’t already know the name.
Sources: Kim Kyung-yoon, “‘새벽 4시부터 줄섰어요’…LA 센추리시티에 올리브영 북미 2호점,” Yonhap News Agency, June 13, 2026. Kil Tae-yoon, “CJ올리브영, 2호점 LA ‘센추리시티점’서도 오픈런… ‘올리브영 팬덤’ 육성할 것,” Cosin Korea, June 14, 2026.
