I’ve spent the past two days writing about Olive Young — the Korean beauty giant that opened its first US store in Pasadena last month to lines that stretched around the block. If you haven’t read Parts 1 and 2, the short version is this: Americans have developed a genuine obsession with Korean skin, built over years of K-Dramas, SkinTok, and a pandemic that had all of us staring at our own faces on Zoom. Olive Young didn’t create that obsession. They just showed up to meet it.
Which brings me to the branding lesson.
Olive Young didn’t launch in America as much as they arrived. And there’s a meaningful difference between those two things.
