Amorepacific kept betting on single-brand stores while Olive Young ate the format

Amorepacific built its Korean retail presence on single-brand storefronts: Aritaum sold only Amorepacific-family cosmetics, and Innisfree ran its own dedicated stores nationwide, following a roadshop model that had defined Korean beauty retail for over two decades.

That model kept losing ground through 2025. Aritaum's franchise count fell from 410 to 372 stores in a single year, down 9.3%. Innisfree's franchise stores fell harder, from 234 to 190, down 18.8%. A third single-brand chain, Tonymory, lost 12.6% of its stores over the same period. Nationwide, the number of cosmetics storefronts fell by nearly 2,000 in a year, a 5.4% drop, with the average franchise store's revenue down 12.6% and a 15.9% closure rate.

CJ Olive Young ran the opposite playbook — one store selling every brand a shopper wanted, from mass-market to prestige, alongside skincare devices and supplements. While single-brand roadshops shrank, Olive Young's revenue grew 21.8% to a record ₩5.8335 trillion, cementing the multi-brand collection-store format as the format Korean beauty shoppers actually wanted.

Amorepacific's response was to fold its surviving single-brand stores into Olive Young's own shelves, redirect investment to e-commerce, and expand overseas — an admission that the storefront model it had run for over two decades no longer worked domestically, arriving only after years of the two formats moving in opposite directions.