Amazon plans to bring 50 Korean hair-care brands to its US store in 2027
Amazon said in Seoul it will help 50 Korean hair-care brands onto its US store in 2027, plus 200 new products. About 44 percent of the K-beauty sold in the US already goes through the site.
Anika Rao
Amazon plans to bring 50 Korean hair-care brands onto its US store in 2027, and to help launch 200 new products. Twenty of the products are supposed to be on sale before Prime Day.
Shin Hwa-sook, head of Amazon Global Selling Korea, announced the plan Tuesday at Amazon Beauty in Seoul. The conference was at the Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas, in Gangnam.
More than 1,300 people were in the room. More than 9,000 watched online.
From January through September, beauty sales by Korean sellers on Amazon nearly doubled from a year earlier. Shin said about 44 percent of the K-beauty sold in the United States now goes through Amazon.
One in five Amazon beauty customers buys Korean beauty. She told sellers that four out of five still do not.
Sephora already stocks Korean brands in its US stores. Shin was talking about the orders placed on Amazon.
She wants hair next. Hair care, she said, is about as large a market as skin care, and K-beauty is still about 1 percent of it.
The products she means are scalp serums, oils, and treatments that borrow from face care. Peptides and PDRN, ingredients already used in a lot of Korean face serums, are showing up in hair.
In the first week of August she spent a day in Los Angeles and went into four stores. The display by the door, where makeup and skin care used to sit, was full of hair products.
She said she thought they were skin care until she looked again.
Bitelab, which makes the hair brand Lilyeve, joined Amazon in 2025. The company said sales from January through September rose more than 500 percent, and that one scalp ampoule sells about 30,000 units a month.
Alongside the hair plan, Amazon offered help for brands just arriving on the US store, and a route into Europe.
Amazon wants 50 brands that are new to its US store to reach $1 million in their first year. It will work for three years with seven larger brands on shipping, pricing, and launches. It has not named the seven.
About 100 Korean brands are meant to open in Europe in 2027. Shin said tax registration and product rules had slowed them, in markets where shoppers were already interested.
Biodance, a Korean mask brand, started in the UK last year and added Germany, France, Italy, and Spain this year. Shin said its European sales during Prime Big Deal Days, earlier this month, were about 50 times last year's. Those four countries were more than half of the European total.
Our take: the 50 hair brands are a 2027 list. If you already reorder Korean serums on Amazon, this is the company asking for the scalp version of that habit.
