The new store will offer multilingual services and a wide selection of Korean beauty products popular among overseas tourists
CJ Olive Young, Korea’s most popular beauty retailer, opened its latest tourist-friendly beauty hub in capital Seoul on November 1. Aimed at catering to foreign tourists’ needs, the Olive Young Myeongdong Town Store has been designed to provide customers with a more convenient shopping experience.
With an average of 3,000 visitors per day and a gross floor area of 1,157 square meter (12,453 square feet), the new traveler-focused mega-scale store stands as the largest Olive Young store in the country.
With overseas tourists accounting for 90% of the store’s customer base, CJ Olive Young has expanded in-store multilingual services to include English, Chinese and Japanese. Additionally, it offers product labeling and section displays in both Korean and English as well as mobile QR codes throughout the store that provide an English floor-by-floor store map for easier navigation.
A monthly collection of Olive Young’s curated items that are popular among overseas tourists is displayed in a K-beauty Now Zone at the front of the store.
The store also boasts a variety of new amenities to give visitors a more comfortable shopping experience, including an exclusive in-store rest area, free Wi-Fi, duty-free services and more. Visitors can also take advantage of the exclusive Global Service Lounge, which provides welcome gifts and discount vouchers for the Olive Young Global Mall to new customers who have signed up for a membership account on the platform.
Through this, Olive Young looks to become a leading K-beauty online-to-offline (O2O) shopping platform worldwide. Also, it will serve as a stepping stone for the small-and-midsized enterprise (SME) brands to reach out to the global market.
As tourism to Korea returns to pre-pandemic levels, sales from overseas tourists at Myeongdong shopping district have risen dramatically over the past year, seeing 840% YoY growth as of October 31. This is in large part due to the increasingly globalized fan base of K-beauty, with a growing number of customers from not only China but also Japan, North America, Southeast Asia. The surging interest in Korean beauty and cosmetics products has also pushed up sales on the Olive Young Global Mall platform, which exports the products to 150 countries, which rose by 77% YoY.
