Buried inside a July 1 Herald Business report on Olive Young’s near-monopoly of Korean beauty retail is a smaller but striking number: Musinsa Beauty’s transaction value on Musinsa’s Global Store grew 360 percent year over year between January 1 and June 24 this year, with the number of brands carried on the platform climbing to roughly 2,000. Unlike Olive Young, which built its dominance through physical health-and-beauty stores, Musinsa is running the same online-to-offline playbook it used to grow its fashion business — and is now bringing it to beauty at a larger physical scale.
The company has two roughly 400-pyeong (about 1,320-square-meter) flagship beauty stores scheduled to open this year, one in Hongdae in September and one in Seongsu in November — both neighborhoods already central to Musinsa’s fashion identity, and both, notably, also neighborhoods where Olive Young runs multiple stores of its own. The strategy mirrors what’s worked for Musinsa overseas: pairing an online platform with attention-grabbing physical spaces designed to convert foot traffic and social buzz into sales, rather than competing purely on store count or price.
Musinsa enters a beauty market that’s already crowding at every price point beneath Olive Young’s dominant position — Daiso’s ultra-cheap beauty aisles, upstart discount chain Off Beauty, and Hyundai Home Shopping’s “Coasis” targeting women in their 40s and 50s. What distinguishes Musinsa’s bet is that it’s arriving with an existing fashion-shopping audience and international storefront already in place, rather than building a beauty-specific customer base from nothing — a different path into the same increasingly contested category.
Source: Kim Jin, Herald Business, July 1, 2026.
