Why American Beauty Brands Are Increasingly “Made in Korea”
Korea’s manufacturing edge is courting American brands— and they’re staying
One of the most significant — and least visible — shifts in the beauty industry over the past decade is that a rapidly growing share of U.S. brands are manufactured in South Korea. The reason comes down to the country’s industrial model.
Two Korean ODMs (original design manufacturers), Cosmax and Kolmar Korea, collectively manufacture products for hundreds of domestic and international brands and have been dubbed the “Foxconns of fast beauty” (Reuters, June 2025). These companies function like Amazon Web Services for skincare: just as a tech startup rents cloud infrastructure, a beauty startup can rent formulation science, packaging design, and production capacity, allowing founders to focus on trend identification, brand storytelling, and distribution instead of chemistry (Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, 2025).
Their success is measurable. Kolmar Korea and Cosmax each crossed ₩2 trillion (roughly $1.4 billion) in 2024 revenue, and both continue to reinvest aggressively in R&D to maintain their formulation edge — a rate of reinvestment rarely matched in Western contract manufacturing (Korea Biomedical Review, February 2025).
This infrastructure has enabled a generation of U.S.-based brands built on Korean formulation. Glow Recipe, co-founded by former L’Oréal Korea executives Christine Chang and Sarah Lee, translated Korean skincare rituals into viral hero products now sold at Sephora. Peach & Lily, founded by Korean-American entrepreneur Alicia Yoon, reached $100 million in net sales within five years of launching its own line in 2018 (Sandbridge Capital, 2024). Hero Cosmetics built its Mighty Patch pimple-patch business entirely on Korean manufacturing partnerships.
For investors, the implication is important: Korean manufacturing is no longer a sourcing quirk. It has become the default infrastructure behind much of the fastest-growing beauty IP in the United States, regardless of where a brand is headquartered or whether it markets itself as “K-beauty” at all.