Anua says K-beauty is replacing French luxury. The Ulta math backs the bet.

Anua is not whispering about shelf share. In a July 24 Korea Times interview, Michelle Miller, North America chief marketing officer at Anua Inc., said Korean beauty is replacing French luxury in the global cosmetics and skincare market, trading heritage prestige for performance, texture, and cultural relevance younger shoppers actually buy.

The company behind the line, The Founders, launched Anua in 2019 and entered the U.S. in 2022. Miller's receipts are blunt: the brand is now in all 1,500 Ulta Beauty doors, plus Amazon and its own site, and global sales grew more than 200 percent a year after the U.S. debut, clearing $500 million last year alone. Company materials also claim TikTok Shop U.S. beauty leadership in 2024. Put together, that is a nationwide premium shelf argument aimed at Chanel, Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, and Guerlain as the old definition of luxury.

Performance over heritage

Miller's framing is the Brand Watch beat. French beauty sold elegance and prestige. K-beauty, in her read, sells innovation, efficacy, advanced textures, and a skincare culture that already trained a generation to care about barrier health and visible results. "We believe the next generation of premium beauty will not only be about traditional luxury codes," she said. "It will be about performance, trust, innovation and cultural relevance." Heartleaf, PDRN, azelaic acid, and TXA are the door openers. Loyalty, she argues, comes after the first bottle works.

The community math is louder than the ambassador math. Nearly 9,000 creators talk about Anua online. From January through May, the brand generated about $97 million in earned media value, up 70 percent year over year, with less than 2 percent of that conversation sponsored. Miller puts Anua among the top ten skincare brands globally for EMV and social share of voice. After recent brand activity, searches for "Anua" rose more than 30 percent, and searches for hero SKUs like the PDRN Serum Spray rose more than 37 percent. That is the trust loop: awareness, then review, then repeat.

Kendall as catalyst, not the strategy

On June 1, Anua named Kendall Jenner its first global ambassador for the PDRN Collagen Glow Facial Serum Spray. She showed up at the SoHo pop-up later that month. Miller is careful not to oversell the seat. Celebrities still create scale fast. Today's shopper, she says, still wants education, creator proof, expert validation, and visible results. "That is why we see Kendall as a catalyst, not the whole strategy." Awareness opens the door. Product and community decide whether anyone comes back.

The same-week commercial move is travel retail. On July 27, Anua locked a partnership with Gebr. Heinemann to push the line through that network, the kind of airport and duty-free footprint French houses once treated as default premium real estate. Put that next to our Amorepacific and LG H&H asset-sale read: conglomerates are selling noncore pieces to chase the indie boom, while houses like Anua are already pricing the boom as the new premium.

Our take

Read this against our how K-beauty took America map and the Medicube spend question. An indie Korean house is now comfortable saying French heritage codes are the old premium, while stacking Ulta endcaps, a 2024 TikTok Shop U.S. beauty lead, and Heinemann travel retail in the same month as the interview. Watch whether "Anua" becomes a category word the way Laneige and Cosrx already did for diaspora shoppers, and whether French houses answer with efficacy language or just bigger celebrity checks. Our read: performance already won the feed. The shelf fight is next.