The world is watching the heyday of K-beauty, and at the center of it all are the "K-beauty designers" who design everything from planning to distribution, marketing, and global strategy.
《K-Beauty Designers》 is a record of author Hwang Dong-hee, who has worked at the forefront of brands for 26 years as an executive at Amorepacific, a leading domestic beauty company, covering brand strategies, indie brand growth mechanisms, strategic collaboration methods with distributors such as Olive Young, global growth methods, and even the leadership of brand leaders who must lead these efforts.

2025, the golden age of K-beauty that is attracting global attention.
It is foolish to analyze this as a trend.
The trend is to find commonalities.
The true driving force behind K-beauty's growth is diversity.
Rather than copying a single trend and riding the wave of trends, we are creating niche brands that maximize small differences in taste and ingredients to create diverse brand experiences and grow them into mega brands.
《K-Beauty Designers》(written by Hwang Dong-hee) is a book that records the strategies of the designers who are creating it, and the fierce decision-making and challenges contained within them.

It provides an opportunity for those working in the industry as well as anyone interested in K-beauty to gain insight into the essence and future of the industry.
The author's 26 years of accumulated expertise and practical advice will provide readers with powerful insights.

This article examines the growth stories of each brand, the changing beauty market behind them, the growth and common strategies of newly emerging indie brands, and, among them, the growth strategies from a global perspective, the diverse ecosystems surrounding K-beauty brands that make them possible, their competitiveness, and their criteria for judgment. It also includes the process of how brands should respond to this with marketing and distribution strategies, and the story of the leader standing before such strategic decisions.
Therefore, this book is a story about various people in the industry who plan and execute K-beauty, and more precisely, a story about their decision-making.


As technology advances, the pace of industrial change is two to three times faster.
In the past, if you entered a company, you would work there for at least 20 years, growing from a new employee, assistant manager, manager, middle leader (team leader), to a new executive. In the process, you would go through various work experiences and trial and error, build relationships by communicating with people of different ranks and organizations, and gradually grow into a solid leader by accumulating experience in solving work problems.


However, most beauty companies these days are shifting from hiring new employees through training to hiring experienced employees and putting them directly into the field. As employees also accept it as a natural phenomenon to change jobs every 3-4 years to build their careers and rise through the ranks, one problem that individuals face remains.
This is the "experience gap" problem of how to address complexities and process design, such as roles and responsibilities, work capabilities and leadership capabilities, problem solving and conflict resolution, short-term task resolution and long-term strategy formulation, and brand initial tasks and growth strategies.
In the past, issues that could be resolved to some extent by working at a company for a long time have now become issues that must be resolved entirely through individual self-development and network expansion.
Especially when your position suddenly changes from a general employee to a leader (team leader, executive), and your decision-making scope and responsibilities suddenly increase, this experience gap can easily lead to a loop of incorrect decision-making.

This book is intended to serve as a reference for these gaps in experience.
Rather than providing individual solutions, I hope this will be a process of accumulating one's own perspective through 'perspectives and interpretations' and finding 'clues' to solve problems.
This book will be helpful not only to those in the beauty industry, but also to those working in or preparing to enter the fields of consumer goods marketing, sales, and strategy, such as fashion, F&B, and those preparing to start a business. It also includes stories from a unique perspective on not only beauty brands and distribution cases, but also the changing processes and roles of K-POP, indie fashion brands, and platforms such as Musinsa and Coupang.


So, if you can read this article and criticize it from a different perspective than the one I interpret, then this article may have achieved its purpose to some extent.
Many people, each with their own knowledge and experience, and the perspectives and interpretations they bring to the table, pursue diverse innovations, which will expand the diversity of K-beauty and contribute to its continued growth.

--- From the text