K-beauty’s new guard has arrived.
Kim Byung-hoon, the 36-year-old founder and chief executive of the APR Corporation, became one of South Korea’s youngest billionaires in July after the K-beauty company’s stock price surged 200 percent from the beginning of 2025. It’s soared even further since then, bringing APR into the ranks of the world’s largest beauty conglomerates. But Kim has larger ambitions.
“We want to be essentially like the early stages of Apple when they first started with the iPhone,” he said on a call with The Business of Beauty. “It was a game-changer within the category, so we want to be something similar, where we’re really bringing these beauty devices and really making it mainstream.”
Kim was referring to the Booster Pro by APR’s largest brand Medicube, a $210 at-home gadget that promises medspa-like treatments and has propelled Medicube to viral status after the K-beauty label launched in the US market in 2020. The device also helped APR quickly scale into a global K-beauty leader. After a 2024 IPO, the company’s over-$6 billion market cap now exceeds that of incumbent leader Amorepacific and approaches Japan’s largest beauty company Shiseido.
It’s not the only Korean giant to emerge during K-beauty’s second wave: still-private Goodai Global, the parent company of Beauty of Joseon and Tirtir, closed an 800 billion KRW ($600 million) private equity investment that values the company at $3.1 billion, the company confirmed to The Business of Beauty. According to Korean news sources, the terms of the deal include an agreement that Goodai will go public within three years.
Although their top brands have all recently launched at either Sephora or Ulta Beauty in the US, these new global beauty leaders first gained power by bypassing the traditional path of US specialty beauty retailers, charting their own journeys to global takeover using mega-influencers and marketplaces like Amazon. But their continued rise relies on navigating US retail to keep up the pace of growth while facing constant tariff uncertainty in their biggest market.
The new wave of K-beauty startups are “really nimble,” said Allison Slater Ray, co-founder of consultancy Breakthru Beauty, which has helped K-beauty clients with their US strategies. “They move really quickly. They see an opportunity, and they jump on it, and they don’t want to wait on anything.”
Rewriting the Playbook
While Medicube is now its number one brand, APR’s name comes from the first brand it launched with in 2014 — skincare label Aprilskin. Medicube was added to its portfolio in 2016. That was a different time for K-beauty, as companies like Amorepacific ballooned from demand in the US, where the first Korean beauty wave was just arriving, and China, where consumers were obsessed with skincare and Korean dramas. APR’s initial focus was on China and Japan for exports.
“Because we’re all based in South Korea, our knowledge of America wasn’t as great,” said Kim.
But K-beauty companies shifted their priorities to the US market as geopolitical disputes between China and South Korea hit the industry hard, just as TikTok started taking off in the US. Medicube jumped at the opportunity with its 2020 US launch, offering an at-home alternative to medspas during lockdown. Rather than going into a major US retailer, it placed its focus on sales from Amazon driven by virality from TikTok, eventually expanding to TikTok Shop. It spent big money on the top celebrities and influencers, including Hailey Bieber, Kylie Jenner and Mikayla Nogueira. The brand now makes up over 80 percent of APR’s total sales, and the US now takes up its largest proportion of sales by country.
While many trendy US DTC brands have shied away from Amazon and aimed to go straight into a specialty beauty retailer, Amazon was a “no-brainer” for Medicube, said Kim.
“Almost everybody in the US was a Prime member,” he said. The Amazon-first model worked equally well for Goodai’s Beauty of Joseon and Tirtir, prior to their respective Sephora and Ulta debuts. When TikTok Shop came around, K-beauty labels were quick adopters, and remain leaders. K-beauty is the top-selling beauty category on TikTok Shop with 132 percent growth in 2025, according to a TikTok spokesperson, and the platform is currently hosting a K-beauty pop-up in Los Angeles with Medicube and Tirtir among the highlights.
K-beauty’s new guard rose by betting on top names, but opting for social media over a traditional celebrity brand ambassador model. While Amorepacific’s Laneige enlisted Sydney Sweeney as the face of its brand as part of its refocus on the US, Medicube saw ROI from social posts such as Bieber’s demonstration of how to use the Booster Pro in front of her bathroom mirror.
“We don’t feel that our brand has become exactly a household name yet, so it’s a really good way of getting into the hands of Kylie’s fans and Hailey’s fans,” said Kim.
But as they’ve become established in the US, the brands have become more focussed on longer-term partnerships. Medicube recently signed Beyoncé’s makeup artist Sir John as its creative director, while Beauty of Joseon announced DJ Peggy Gou as its brand ambassador this summer.
Levelling Up
With $423 million in global sales for the first half of 2025, APR’s goal to achieve household name status has meant moving Medicube beyond Amazon and into Ulta Beauty, said Kim. Goodai, meanwhile, is poised to reach $1.2 billion in sales in 2025, according to company projections, nearly doubling its $676 million in sales for 2024.
“If we look at the marketing funnel, there’s people at the top that are early adopters, and maybe they’re a little bit more sensitive to trends,” said Kim. “Those are the people that we can capture through online content the most. But it’s not the majority of the people in the US.”
With the US trade war, K-beauty giants have continued to grow rapidly through a year of uncertainty over Trump’s tariffs. Originally announced at 25 percent, US tariffs on South Korea were reduced to 15 percent as they’re still being fought in the courts.
“There’s no way of avoiding it,” said Kim of tariffs. “But we also know that it’s not something that’s just singular to our company. It’s something that impacts the industry as a whole, so we’re just trying to maneuver it to the best of our abilities.” That includes continued diversification, with Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia and the Middle East all serving as strong growth sources.
These new giants have to carefully refine their international strategies, and their approach to acquisitions differs dramatically from their predecessors. While Amorepacific previously followed in the footsteps of Shiseido in acquiring US brands, newer groups show no such interest. Goodai’s portfolio now includes not only viral brands like Beauty of Joseon and Tirtir, but up-and-comers like the owner of skincare label Round Lab, a deal finalized in September 2025. They are also quick to offload brands that don’t deliver. While Goodai acquired an 88 percent stake in makeup brand Laka last year, it sold the stake to a former Tirtir executive in August.
APR, meanwhile, is prioritising the device market, and according to Kim, future acquisitions would be focussed on building up Medicube’s technology.
“It wouldn’t necessarily be for a new brand outside of Medicube, but it could be for a smaller startup that has really good technology that we want to implement within some of the new Medicube lineups,” said Kim. “We don’t want to be a simple beauty company, but we really want to be looked at as a beauty tech company.”
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