All Live Better
In 2025, Olive Young is betting on wellness and global expansion.
Photography: Seoul Cult
At lunchtime in Seoul's bustling Gwanghwamun district, shoppers wait behind a velvet rope to enter CJ Olive Young's new wellness store, Olive Better. Inside, visitors browse a curated selection of wellness products supporting mindful, daily routines—including inner-beauty foods, nutritional supplements, fitness gear, aromatherapy, dermacosmetics, sleep enhancers, and oral-care essentials.
The shop, which opened on January 30 in D-Tower, spans over 430 square meters across two floors and stocks around 3,000 products from over 500 brands. The location was deliberately chosen for its context: Gwanghwamun is a high-traffic business district surrounded by yoga studios and gyms. In line with Olive Young’s new strategy, the store is intended to slot into a working day rather than require a detour from it, expressing the belief that wellness should fit real life, not demand a lifestyle change.
“Wellness should fit real life, not demand a lifestyle change.”
“While the global wellness market has continued to grow since COVID-19, offline touchpoints that provide personalised recommendations and hands-on experiences remain limited,” an Olive Young spokesperson comments in a press release published on the company’s homepage.
“A movement towards wholeness - a desire to care for how you feel, sleep, move, recover, and eat.”
A second Olive Better store is planned near Gangnam Station in the first half of 2026, with further expansion across Seoul’s major commercial areas to follow. The concept is already integrated into an App-in-App platform within the existing Olive Young app, which offers personalised wellness recommendations and routine reminders based on individual user profiles.
Lee Dong-geun, Head of New Growth Retail Business, has described the aim as lowering the entry barriers to wellness — making it available, daily, and genuinely useful, rather than aspirational or intimidating.
Each year, Olive Young publishes a trend keyword that attempts to name the cultural moment. For 2026, that word is FULLMOON. It describes a movement toward wholeness—a desire to care not only about how you look, but also about how you feel, sleep, move, recover, and eat. The company explains that FULLMOON is an acronym for focus, uncover, listen, lifestyle, mindful, optimise, original, and nourish, describing key elements Olive Young believes will define health and beauty for the next generation.
In January, Olive Young also announced a global strategic partnership with Sephora, introducing dedicated K-beauty zones curated by Olive Young to be rolled out across Sephora’s online and offline channels. These K-beauty zones will launch in fall 2026 across approximately 700 Sephora locations in the US and Canada, as well as in major Asian markets including Hong Kong SAR, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. Expansion into the Middle East, the UK, and Australia will follow in 2027. Notably, Sephora entered South Korea in 2019 and exited in 2024, unable to compete with Olive Young’s market dominance, store density, and cultural fluency.
Each store will offer a carefully chosen selection of Korean beauty and wellness products, alongside local US brands.
