A mask pack marketed under actor Ha Yu-mi's name is reported to have generated 700 billion won ($525 million) in sales.
Yang Chang-hee, a director at skincare brand Gash, appeared Monday on broadcaster Jeon Hyun-moo's YouTube channel "Jeon Hyun-moo's Seller-brity" and shared the story behind the brand's success.
Founded in 2024, Gash shot to the top of CJ Olive Young's online mall mask pack category within a single day of launching on the platform last month — a sign of the brand's rapid rise.
"There are more than 30,000 beauty brands in Korea, and if each puts out just 10 products, that's over 300,000 products on the market — breaking into the top 100 is hard enough, let alone getting listed online," Yang said. "By November, we'll be in more than 700 stores."
Yang, who has worked in web design, marketing and other fields, described how he came to team up with Gash founder and CEO Jang Jae-kwon. "I was already thinking about starting a business when Jang kept reaching out — I'd say he approached me at least ten times. It felt like he wasn't going to give up unless I joined," he said.
"Jang is a truly remarkable person. He's spent more than a decade in beauty retail, but what matters isn't how long you've been in the industry — it's at what level you operated," Yang went on to say. Yang then recounted the success of the "Ha Yu-mi mask pack," a hydrogel sheet mask that took the market by storm after its 2007 launch.
"He would source products from a mask pack manufacturer and then launch, market and sell them through home shopping — what they called a 'planning vendor' back then," Yang said. "Starting from when sales were just 600 million won, a single product ended up generating between 600 billion and 700 billion won in domestic sales alone — not even counting overseas." He added, "I think that record still stands to this day."
The Ha Yu-mi mask pack topped the home shopping mask pack category in the year of its launch, posting strong sales figures.
"One of the things that impressed me most about him is that he appeared on home shopping broadcasts more than 1,600 times," Yang said. "He's like the founding father of media commerce. The know-how he built up back then may feel a bit dated and rough around the edges now, but with just a little refinement, it still delivers real results."
paq@heraldcorp.com
