Musinsa charged sellers 27.8% commission and blocked them from rival platforms

Musinsa built Korea's largest fashion and streetwear platform — roughly 4.5 trillion won in annual transaction volume across more than 8,000 vendor brands — on a direct-purchase (직매입) model that let it set commission rates well above rivals: reported at 27.8%, against Coupang's 12.3%, G Market's 11.7% and Naver's 6.3%. Vendors said Musinsa also pushed the cost of discount promotions onto them as a condition of continued stocking, and penalized those who refused.

On August 26, 2024, Korea's Fair Trade Commission opened its first on-site investigation of Musinsa, examining suspected violations of the Large-Scale Distribution Business Act: unfair return practices, shifting promotional costs to suppliers, and — separately — contract clauses requiring vendors to get Musinsa's approval before selling on competing platforms, a restriction the FTC's 2023 platform-monopoly guidelines treat as anticompetitive.

The scrutiny arrived as Musinsa pursued what would be Korea's largest fashion-platform IPO, targeting a valuation near 10 trillion won ($7B). 2025 revenue rose 18.1% to 1.46 trillion won and operating profit grew 36.7% to 140.5 billion won, but net income fell 41.2% to 7.7 billion won. In March 2026, a separate scandal emerged: some vendors on the platform were found relabeling cheap Chinese-made goods as their own designs, raising questions about how closely Musinsa verified the products it took a cut of.

By May 2026, Korean press was framing the FTC probe as a direct threat to the listing, quoting an industry official: justifying a 10-trillion-won valuation requires demonstrating transaction transparency and regulatory compliance — 'not just revenue growth.'