Save this story Save Story Save this story Cutting through the crowded K-beauty market takes a special mix of product innovation and social media savvy, which very few manage to achieve. But for seven-year-old Anua, a viral concoction of Korean botanical formulas, sleek branding and a hint of star power (from Kendall Jenner ) has helped the brand break through globally this year.
There are currently more than half a million posts featuring the #Anua hashtag on TikTok, including product reviews from the likes of Mexican beauty creator Mireya Rios (five million followers) and application walkthroughs by celebrity makeup artist Mary Phillips (461,700 followers), garnering over seven billion views altogether. The brand’s most recent success, though, is its collaboration with Netflix animation — and cultural phenomenon — KPop Demon Hunters , thought up by the brand’s co-founder and CEO Changju Lee, and overseen by recently appointed CMO Michelle Miller.
“It’s been a wild six months,” Miller says over Zoom from her LA base (the rest of Anua’s in-house team remains in Seoul). Miller started at Anua in April 2026, arriving from cult haircare label K18 where she worked as founding CMO. “The growth has been very fast. We’re now a top 10 brand in earned media value globally and top four in the US.”
Left to right: PDRN Hyaluronic Acid Cream, Heartleaf Cleansing Oil, Heartleaf Quercetinol Cleansing Foam, Azelaic Acid 10 Serum, Heartleaf 77 Soothing Toner. Photo: Courtesy of Anua
Anua launched in Seoul in 2019 with its Heartleaf 77% Soothing Toner ($21). The skin-soothing, anti-inflammatory properties of its hero heartleaf ingredient broke through the market, responding precisely to the white space its co-founders Lee and Seonhyeong Yi, whose paths crossed at Seoul National University, identified pre-launch.
Anua’s current range is in hot demand. The Founders Inc., the brand’s parent company, which was founded by Lee and Yi in 2017 and is entirely self-funded, reported 68% year-on-year revenue growth in 2025. The company did not share how much was generated by Anua, but in the portfolio, it sits alongside the founders’ first venture, Project 21, a pet lifestyle brand, as well as dermatological haircare label Fromlabs.
“When we began exploring the market, we found that consumers were often overwhelmed by complicated routines and products that didn’t always address their everyday skin concerns,” Lee says. “Our research pointed to a clear need: effective, gentle skincare at a reasonable price that people can easily incorporate into their daily lives.”
This early focus on simplifying a category associated with science-led ingredients — unknown and, in some cases, unsafe to the average drugstore skincare user — helped Anua get its foothold in an already-bustling K-beauty business. But the turning point was when the brand branched out beyond its hero heartleaf line to respond to what the customer wanted next. Soon came the Niacinamide 10% + TXA 4% Serum ($22), an active formula still focused on gentle and guided application, followed by its Azelaic Acid 10% Serum ($22) and PDRN line ($21-$28) featuring a cream and a hyaluronic acid serum (Jenner’s favorite). The PDRN cream ranked #1 in the facial moisturizer category on Amazon US in September, Lee shares.
Anua hosted its first Dew on the Go pop-up in New York in June to celebrate its PDRN line. Photo: Courtesy of Anua
After gaining steam on TikTok Shop and Amazon — Anua prides itself on being “digitally native” — Anua broke into the real-life retail space with Ulta Beauty in the US in February 2025, where it now ranks among the retailer’s top five skincare brands. As for the rest of its physical doors (there are over 40,000 globally), it can be found in Sephoras worldwide, as well as UK multi-brand stores spanning Selfridges to Boots.
However, competing in the K-beauty race is not easy. It is a trend-led category with a new disrupter brand seemingly each week, from Medicube to Beauty of Joseon and Cosrx, all r eaching for virality through innovation and a rapid speed-to-market. The online K-beauty market was worth $15 billion globally in 2025, up from $12.5 billion a year prior, according to Euromonitor International. And then there’s the question of category longevity: the possibility that another breakthrough market, like Chinese C-beauty or Scandi beauty, might bubble up and take K-beauty’s steam (China made up 21% of online K-beauty sales globally in 2025, per Euromonitor, down from 66% a year earlier).
How is Anua planning to compete and stay the course? Its next phase, Lee says, is about keeping customer acquisition flowing, while converting its current customers from trend-led purchasers to loyal brand fans.
To pin down the KPop Demon Hunters partnership, Lee reached out to Netflix personally to secure the IP for the year and then pitched the campaign to Ulta, acquiring additional shelf space across the brand’s US stores and claiming premium merchandising spots, where footfall is higher.
The rise of Korean culture, from K-pop to K-dramas, has played a big role in boosting K-beauty globally, with more consumers looking to adopt trends inspired by their favorite stars. The Netflix hit offered Anua the perfect opening, says Miller. “It was such a natural tie-in. When KPop Demon Hunters saw wild success globally, especially in the US market, it was a really proud moment for Korea. And for us, it’s a cultural intersection that we can tap into,” she says. “People are just eating up Korean culture, and wanting more.”
The year-long campaign, which runs through February 2027, includes a short film shot by K-pop music video director Kylie Kang that translates the franchise’s storyline — a fictional girl group who double as pop idols and supernatural demon slayers — to fighting everyday skin woes. Accompanying 48-hour pop-ups took place in October at two of Ulta Beauty’s LA outposts — Santa Monica and Westwood — resulting in snaking queues and surpassing sales targets by more than 62%, according to Miller.
The limited-edition KPop Demon Hunters range on sale at the brand’s Ulta Beauty activation in LA. Photo: Courtesy of Anua
However, KPop Demon Hunters is predominantly associated with an audience as young as 10, and some of Anua’s bestsellers are stocked with active ingredients. How is it avoiding the promotion of harsh formulas for vulnerable skin? “In the collection for KPop , we exclusively have pimple patches, a really gentle sheet mask, a sunscreen — so barrier-protecting products that can translate across different skin,” Miller explains, adding that it’s also helping the brand widen its consumer base. “It’s allowed us to capture both moms and their daughters, which is not a bad place to be.”
Beyond cultural tie-ins, creator-led marketing is leading the way. “Our most valuable marketing investment has been building our creator community,” says CEO Lee. “From the beginning, we invested in getting products into the hands of consumers and creators who could share their experiences. That approach helped us build credibility, drive discovery, and better understand what consumers wanted.”
With trust in traditional influencers slowly dwindling , Anua continues to adopt a tiered approach to seeding (the sending of free product samples to influencers without a paid contract to post). “We seed a lot, and we have different layers of that,” Miller explains. “We have seeding efforts through our TikTok Shop affiliates. We have wider seeding efforts to micro-creators, or to those who are more niche, like a specific college community or a nurse. And then we have our more strategic seeding of top creators. At the end of the day, people trust people, and that’s what converts.”
How does the brand decide who it works with? “When you work with the volume of creators that we do, it’s about looking at it from a few different lenses. First, we need to reach a trifecta of different creators, so people with different skin tones, skin problems, personas, ages. Then, we have a great community of experts, such as dermatologists and makeup artists, that really builds trust. And finally, we have people like Kendall [Jenner], who are moving culture.”
Jenner was announced as Anua’s first-ever global brand ambassador in June, which felt like the natural next step, says Lee. “As Anua scales, we’re maintaining our investment in grassroots creators while expanding into global partnerships, experiential marketing, and integrated retail campaigns. Our partnership with Kendall represents this next stage, introducing Anua to a global audience,” he says. The campaign shines light on the brand’s viral PDRN line, which Jenner already had an affinity for, according to Miller; the model’s makeup artist, Phillips, uses the PDRN cream as part of her viral underpainting technique, where the face is contoured prior to applying foundation.
Beyond acquisition, the bigger challenge is building loyalty, says Lee, which is where listening comes in. “We use consumer data, social listening, customer reviews, and direct feedback to identify emerging needs and develop products around them,” he explains. Miller agrees that listening is the brand’s edge. “I’d say our playbook has always been to start with the customer, really listen to the customer, and I think social media has provided new ways of doing that,” she adds.
Outside the Dew on the Go event in SoHo. Photo: Courtesy of Anua
This includes product review videos — positive or negative. “Consumer feedback is central to how we operate. Because Anua was built digitally, we’ve always had a close connection with our customers, monitoring ratings, written feedback, and social conversations to understand what’s working and where we can improve,” says Lee. “Those insights have led us to reformulate products, develop new ones, and adjust our marketing direction.” The brand decided to reformulate its bestselling Heartleaf Cleansing Oil to create a new, mild formula based on customer feedback, with fewer ingredients and better tailored to sensitive skin.
What it comes down to, though, is reacting to what consumers want in real time, to stay on top of a fast-moving market. For example, the brand launched an azelaic acid serum in December 2024, having noticed an uptick in searches for the ingredient. The Azelaic Acid 10% Serum is currently Ulta Beauty’s top-selling serum. “We were early to that trend, and were able to create a formulation people really want,” Miller says, flagging that, as with any active ingredient the brand rolls out, education is key. “We have our dermatologist and expert community to explain what ‘10% active’ means [on social media], how to use it, when, and what the best skin type is for that.”
As Anua works to build a full regime that customers return to year after year, pushing beyond one or two viral bestsellers, it is flexing its retail muscles. The brand rolled out in 40 physical SpaceNK stores in September, as well as Selfridges in the summer, where it hosted dedicated retail pop-ups across London, Birmingham and Manchester. “Our biggest opportunity is evolving Anua from a viral K-beauty brand into a globally recognized skincare label that will be around in a long time. We know creator marketing is a big part of that, but it’s also about leaning into retail, real-life experiences, and just building a whole ecosystem of Anua,” Miller says.
Celebrity makeup artist Mary Phillips hosts a masterclass in LA, using the brand’s PDRN products. Photo: Courtesy of Anua
For Lee, this comes with a new set of challenges. “One of our biggest challenges has been evolving from a digitally native brand into a global organization operating across different markets, retail environments, and consumer cultures,” he says. “The strategies that drive growth online don’t always translate directly into physical retail. Each market requires a deeper understanding of local consumers, shopping habits, and commercial dynamics.”
To drive growth, it needs stronger teams with new expertise, as well as the infrastructure to support a larger business, he continues. “We’ve had to balance that operational discipline with the speed and entrepreneurial mindset that helped build Anua,” he says. Lee also plans to keep listening to consumers to determine his next steps. “We assess expansion through the consumer’s experience: can they easily find the product they want, understand its benefits, and buy it through a retailer they trust? Building a global brand means delivering on those expectations consistently.”
As for the ultimate goal, Lee says something surprising for a brand operating in one of the buzziest markets. “We’re proud of our Korean heritage, but we don’t want to be defined solely as a K-beauty brand,” he says. “We want to be recognized for innovation, performance and trust; one that is still relevant and thriving 100 years from now.”
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Source: Lifestyle
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