Olive Young US Pasadena Launch: Why K-Beauty Fans Are Upset

What happened Olive Young opened its first US store in Pasadena on May 29, an 8,647-square-foot location carrying roughly 5,000 products from about 400 brands. It drew around 6,000 visitors over opening weekend, and a US-exclusive e-commerce site launched the same day. The company plans five-plus California stores, with a second opening at Westfield Century City in June. Within ten days, the company's overseas customers had filed enough complaints to drag the Olive Young US app to 2.8 out of 5 on the US App Store. Instagram and Reddit threads, along with online petitions, pushed the company to reopen the global site. Why the doubled loyalty threshold angered Olive Young’s cross-border shoppers Three changes drove the discontent. Olive Young moved US residents off its Global Mall — the platform it has shipped K-beauty worldwide from since 2019 — onto a separate US site and loyalty program, where the spending threshold for top-tier status doubled to $600 over six months, from $300, with points adjusted in the switch. At launch, the US catalog also ran shorter, listing 92 sun-care products against 797 on the global site, a gap the company attributed to Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rules that treat sunscreen as an over-the-counter drug. And prices diverged: the Anua PDRN serum listed at $27.50 on the US site, against a Global Mall set that paired the same serum with a cream for $26.53. The pushback was immediate. Within 10 days, complaints from Olive Young’s overseas customers had dragged its US app to 2.8 out of 5 on the US App Store, and Instagram threads, Reddit posts and online petitions converged on a single demand: bring back the global site. The company first tried to absorb the criticism. In a statement posted to Instagram, Olive Young said it was reviewing feedback and would widen the lineup, add brands and improve benefits — but stopped short of addressing the central demand to reopen the global site or restore the old tier system. Within days it conceded that point too, reopening the global site to US shoppers. The Jing Take Before the US, there was China. Olive Young entered through Shanghai in 2013 and grew to 10 stores, then pulled all of them after the 2016 deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system triggered Chinese economic retaliation against Korean brands; the China business has run at a loss since. That exit was a geopolitical shock, outside the company’s control. The echo now is the ambition — a Korean retailer betting its model travels — but this time the problems are self-inflicted. The US bet rests on the customers Olive Young built online. It chose Pasadena for its proximity to Los Angeles, the source of the largest share of its US cross-border sales, and designed the stores to feed into its US e-commerce site as a single omnichannel system. That model only works if those shoppers follow the brand onto its US platforms and keep buying. Its loudest critics were the cross-border shoppers who had bought from the global site for years — Olive Young’s own regulars. A Korean licensed esthetician posting as @seoulfulstrength, who has shopped at Olive Young in South Korea, called the migration “a huge fumble”: US customers lost the global site they valued for “items you can't find here,” the Korea-exclusives and collaborations. She also faulted the Pasadena assortment for leaning on “brands you can already find at Sephora and Ulta” when the draw was supposed to be Korean skincare. A creator posting as @morganalisonstewart, who says she wants the retailer to succeed, made the same case on identity: the launch “felt like taking a Korean brand and Americanizing it,” with Korean labels “pushed out in favor of western beauty brands” available at Target or Amazon anyway. The membership reset drew the sharpest reaction because it wiped out progress customers had already made. Tier status and points did not carry over, so shoppers “lost all of that work and money spent,” @morganalisonstewart said, and the cost of status roughly doubled — from a $300 gold threshold on the global site to $600 over six months on the US one. The sunscreen change drew less anger, since both creators saw it as unavoidable: Olive Young reformulates for the US market to meet FDA rules, which @morganalisonstewart said she had expected after the company emailed customers a month earlier. The reformulation still carries a cost, because the brand’s cream-textured Korean sunscreens were part of what made the global catalog worth seeking out. Sephora, Ulta and Amazon now stock the same K-beauty labels The loyalty reset and the higher prices were choices, not constraints; FDA rules account only for the sunscreen gap. The market has also moved past needing Olive Young as a gateway. US K-beauty sales rose 37% to $2 billion in the year to July 31, 2025, according to NielsenIQ, and Sephora, Ulta and Amazon now stock the same brands — Olive Young will itself supply a curated K-beauty range to 650 Sephora stores across the US and Canada beginning this fall. Having taught a generation of US buyers what to want, the retailer has now given them a reason to buy it elsewhere. The Jing Take reports on a piece of the leading news and presents our editorial team’s analysis of the key implications for the luxury industry. In the recurring column, we analyze everything from product drops and mergers to heated debate sprouting on Chinese social media.

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Olive Young bet its US future on the wrong site

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag