Olive Young brings 'K-wellness' into focus with Olive Better

CJ Olive Young has become a living catalog of the ever-expanding world of K-beauty. It is now seeking to extend that formula to wellness, this time in a separate store format.

Named Olive Better, Olive Young’s first wellness-curation store opens Friday, as the beauty retailer tries to turn a sprawling post-pandemic wellness boom into something more concrete and legible. The two-story flagship in Gwanghwamun, Seoul, carries around 3,000 products from more than 500 brands, spanning categories tied to everyday health and well-being.

“Despite a shift in consumer awareness in health, there has been no single channel that brings the concept of wellness together in a comprehensive way,” said Lee Dong-keun, who leads the company’s new growth retail business, at a press conference on Thursday. “Health, like beauty, has long been a core pillar of Olive Young’s business, and extending that foundation into wellness is something we are uniquely equipped to do.”

According to the company, Olive Better is meant to make wellness feel more practical in daily life, while positioning "K-wellness" alongside the global rise of K-beauty and K-food.

“Just as with the logic behind starting this business, Olive Better is not a subcategory inside Olive Young, but will sit as a separate, independent brand in the same offline commercial spaces as Olive Young,” Lee added.

The wellness-focused store is structured around a broad set of health-related categories. The first floor caters to office workers with grab-and-go meals and health supplements, while the second is organized around six longer-term routines meant to track the rhythms of an ordinary day: Eat well, Nourish well, Fit well, Glow well, Relax well and Care well.

Rather than launching a standalone app, the store’s online presence is housed within Olive Young’s mobile platform, a choice meant to draw on the retailer’s customer base. “At the early stage, embedding Olive Better as an app-in-app allows us to immediately leverage Olive Young’s data, traffic and membership system,” Lee said.

Though still a domestic rollout, the platform is closely aligned with Olive Young’s overseas strategy. Citing Olive Young’s data on inbound global customers, the company said foreign shoppers already consume beauty and wellness together as part of everyday life, treating them as a single lifestyle proposition.

“Because this is a business that starts from Olive Young, it will move forward together with Olive Young’s broader vision and its global expansion plans,” Lee explained. As for immediate overseas expansion, he said it was still too early to say whether the concept would appear in the company’s US store opening in May.