The 2023 Olive Young Awards & Festa held at the DDP on Dec. 12 (a beautifully designed architecture by Zaha Hadid) and I thought those of you in the beauty industry and interest in the Korean beauty landscape would find the analysis interesting.
The Conference started off with Olive Young updating the latest stat (analysis of over 150 million transaction data) and what they thought were the key trends. For those who do not know Olive Young (as in ALL should LIVE YOUNG), it is the single largest Health & Beauty retail platform with over 1300 offline stores and its online store transaction volume is over USD 1billion.
It is estimated that there are about 30 million economically active population in South Korea. Olive Young’s total customers number reaches a little over 14million and about 10 million are active customers. 74% of the active customers are female with men’s entry jumped 1.5x compared to 2022. 61% of their customers are in their 20~30s but the highest growth number comes from the 50s, 32% YoY.
Olive Young version of the key trend in the Korean beauty landscape are the following:
1) Boundless – the boundary between beauty and health no longer exists. You are only beautiful as long as you are internally healthy. What the Koreans call ‘Inner Beauty’ referring to beautiful appearance by means of filling up your skin with collagens and the like, has a northward trajectory at a 45degree angle. This year alone, the growth was 37%, YoY. So, what do people think inner beauty is? It is healthy skin (collagen, etc), diet supplements (slimming etc), supplements to aid metabolism (enzymes, etc), nutrition (protein etc), stress management (theanine etc), sleeping aid (lactium etc).
2) Omnichannel Shift - People are now buying brands they know via online. The number of people buying both on & offline increased 223% since Covid 19 pandemic.
3) Teenager Beauty - Teens make important customer base especially in the make-up category. 92%, out of 1,659 teenager survey said that they made the purchase decision for this category, consisting of products like pimple patches, tee tree masks, fake lashes, hair accessories, etc.
4) Conscious Beauty – a shift from Clean beauty, 78% of the respondents are willing to re-purchase conscious beauty items. Consumption is more meaningful even for the very pragmatic Koreans.
5) Men’s Grooming – this category is not just growing but clustering into different segmented buying behaviors; from daily essential buyers to self grooming buyers and styling buyers.
6) New Luxe or “Luxe Edit”- the emerging popularity of global brands like MAC & L’occitane to local brands like Primera & Suum reflects growing sophistication of brand selection by consumers in general. These are brands with unique philosophy, offering differentiated experiences and continuously interacting with their customers. Luxury doesn’t end with product selection but how consumers perceive luxury. There is a 105% increase in sales of home-spa related products such as home beauty devices and micro segmenting of personal care category items such as oral care, nail care, and foot care at home.
7) FOBO (Fear of Better Option) – side effect of too much information leads to hesitation of not knowing what to buy. So, people tend to rely on what others have bought. Product or experience reviews have become more important than ever.
8) Early Care Syndrome - people want to slow aging process. 80% of consumers replied that they commit to regular aging care routine, even in their early 20s. So, their routine would include using skincare product with anti-aging active ingredients, taking supplements to help boost skin health, home massage, use of beauty devices, etc. Sales increased 53% YoY for these products related to age slowing.
The Conference also included 3 other presentations that I thought were very interesting. One particular brand called ISOI received Olive Young Award for 9 consecutive years and the founder & CEO came up the stage and told her story. This story deserves a separate feature story of its own.
A big hand to all brands that received Olive Young Award this year!
'올리브영이 바라보는 Next 헬스 & 뷰티' 트렌드는?