Korean beauty retailer Pureseoul calls itself the UK’s “home of K-Beauty”. Since launching online in 2019, it has rapidly expanded its physical presence with a London flagship and boutiques in Manchester, Brighton, Cambridge, Oxford and Birmingham. It now stocks over 70 brands and 2,000 SKUs across nine stores, specializing in Korean-born brands, including Torriden, Beauty of Joseon, Celimax, Amuse, Medicube and Biodance.
Co-founded by former Bloomberg fintech executive Leslie Tang, makeup artist Wing Sze Tang and illustrator Gracie Tullio, Pureseoul’s mission, according to the team, is to make Korean beauty accessible to UK shoppers. The business, headquartered in London, doubled its headcount from 150 to 300 in the past year, with plans to open 15 more stores in 2026. Tang believes a total of 30 will be enough to cover the UK, before exploring an expansion into Europe. In October, Pureseoul also inked a deal with British retailer Superdrug to bring a curated selection of its K-beauty bestsellers to 30 Superdrug stores, including in Westfield London, Manchester and Glasgow.
K-beauty has become big business. Korea’s cosmetic exports hit $10.2 billion in 2024, up 20.6% year-on-year, rising steadily from $1 billion in 2012. For most of the category, the focus is Japan, China, or the US, says Tullio — markets seen as more promising, lucrative and culturally aligned than the UK in the early days of Pureseoul, with established Korean populations to sell to. “A lot of brands weren’t interested in the UK; most didn’t have someone on their team who even spoke English,” she recalls. Now, K-beauty has become a significant business for global beauty retailers, driven by social media virality and product innovation. In the UK specifically, the category is projected to nearly double, from £439 million in 2023 to £855 million by 2032.
The founders credit their direct relationships with brands — acting as a liaison to introduce them to the UK market and bypassing wholesale — as a key driver of their success. It’s allowed Pureseoul to foster a credible launchpad for indie, mass and prestige brands to minimize risk entering the UK market, by assisting with everything from label translations, partnering on new product development and aligning with cultural touchpoints for both brands and consumers, to remain authentic yet appeal to a UK customer.
While they did not disclose details of their turnover, Tang reports that Pureseoul has grown 500% year-on-year since 2019. In August 2025, HSBC provided funding of £4.1 million to support its next growth stage, including three store openings, IT development and an estimated 100 new jobs across customer service and warehouse operations.
Pureseoul — competing against retailers like Boots, Space NK and Sephora for a slice of the pie — wants to ride that wave and build a full-blown K-beauty empire in the UK and beyond. Will it work?
Grappling with market challenges
According to Tang, more than 3,000 beauty brands launched in Korea last year alone, with Korean cosmetics now the leading export among all small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This, in part, is driven by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups’s K-Beauty Fund, which will total KRW 40 billion ($28 million) by the end of 2025. The initiative provides SMEs with financial, production, and research and development support to double the value of SME cosmetic exports by 2027.
While Pureseoul doesn’t directly receive this funding, it does aid the survival and growth of brands pivoting to focus on foreign markets and rise above the competition. In 2025, Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety reported that 8,831 registered beauty sellers closed their businesses last year, the highest recorded in the past six years.
Even for those eager to expand Westward, Tang explains, costs to ensure compliance with UK regulations across product labeling and safety assessments remain the biggest obstacle. “The whole process can take up to six months. For brands to invest in that process, which may be relatively small at the time, is a big commitment. We can streamline that,” she says.
For Pureseoul, this ranges from advising on label translations, adapting cultural terminology for UK consumers, and assisting with the registration process.
When a brand is onboarded, the first six to nine months are focused on building awareness, social media storytelling and understanding its UK and global strategy, with the retailer assessing its retail footprint and potential competitiveness before bringing the brand to British shelves.
Maintaining an intimate relationship with its brands, coupled with the company’s keen focus on monitoring its consumer behavior both in-store and online, has been pivotal to establishing its reputation as a credible source of Korean beauty for the UK customer.
Tullio describes the Pureseoul shopper as a hyper-focused K-beauty customer, aged 20 to 35. “We know our customers intimately. Every store also has a whiteboard in the back with product requests from shoppers, the main skin concern of each week,” she says. “Any product or brand that we don’t have, is immediately recorded, tallied and reviewed by us weekly. We also review data from our website, such as what searches are returning zero results and the most-searched ingredients.”
Skincare line Hanskin, for example, has worked with the retailer for four years, a relationship that has led to joint product development, as well as Pureseoul advising on packaging, labeling and product names. Tullio adds that cultural sensitivity is key to those relationships. “Everything about the way Korean brands do business is so personal. They care deeply about what it looks like on the shelf, which brands it’s positioned against and how we’re conveying the ingredients to customers.”
Navigating mass retail competition
Over the past 12 months, UK health and wellness retailers such as Boots and Lookfantastic have demonstrated an increasing commitment to embracing the Korean beauty boom. While Tullio doesn’t view generic beauty retailers as direct competition, they shouldn’t be ignored either.
According to Lisa Payne, head of beauty at trends forecaster Stylus, established UK retailers are already doing a good job of finding and hosting the more viral and social media-friendly brands — and for mass consumers, this offering is enough.
“Consumers are more likely to engage with new K-beauty brands when popping in-store to pick up a refill of their favorite Charlotte Tilbury setting spray, for example, than they are heading out on a dedicated K-beauty finding mission,” she says.
Pureseoul’s partnership with Superdrug marks a strategic bridge between niche expertise and mass retail reach. It positions the specialist retailer as both an educator and gatekeeper for Korean beauty in mainstream retail, while ensuring consumers without a Pureseoul store in their city can still enjoy its offering. Maintaining brand integrity was key for Pureseoul when collaborating with a mass retailer whose consumers differ from the hyperaware K-beauty consumer that makes up most of its own footfall.
For Superdrug, the collaboration answers a clear consumer demand. “Our customers have been asking for authentic Korean beauty products for quite some time, particularly our younger, trend-aware shoppers who follow what’s happening globally in beauty,” Simon Comins, Superdrug’s chief operating officer, tells Vogue Business.
Tullio underscores the importance of positioning Pureseoul as an authority on Korean beauty within Superdrug branding. The in-store K-Beauty Express Bar is organized by skincare routine and type, rather than brand, a concept Pureseoul pushed to include, complete with testers not typically seen among drugstore skincare aisles, she says, with expansion into a further two stores on the horizon.
Pureseoul’s founders are adamant about doing the Korean beauty category justice. “It shouldn’t be in a back alley; it deserves to be on the same stage as all other beauty brands,” says Tullio. “Other retailers are dabbling in K-beauty, but it’s a totally different experience from a Pureseoul store. From a retail perspective, it only amplifies the Korean beauty market and our authority within it.”
By the end of 2026, Pureseoul hopes to have 30 stores across the country before teeing up an expansion into Europe, namely Germany and France, with demand mostly coming from brands that have already been approached by other retailers. According to Tullio, some have expressed their readiness for the European market, but are loyal to Pureseoul in their pursuit of global success.
These close relationships between the business and its cohort of brands are the catalyst for future growth, she says, especially as ownership remains in-house: “We don’t have shareholders in different countries giving requests down the phone; we have full ownership with what we’re doing. We don’t have to answer to anyone but ourselves, and that allows us to be flexible. That’s what makes us different from mass retailers.”
Correction: Simon Comins’s title is chief operating officer, not chief commercial officer. (8 November 2025)
