6 Korean Beauty Brands Owned by Beauty of Joseon's Parent, Which Wants a 6.8 Billion Dollar IPO

Goodai Global is chasing a 10 trillion won valuation on the Korea Exchange, roughly 6.8 billion dollars at February 2026 exchange rates. If it clears, Beauty of Joseon's parent will land in the tier of APR Corporation, the Medicube maker that crossed 10 trillion won in late 2025 and overtook Amorepacific as Korea's most valuable beauty company. That is the number that pushed who owns Beauty of Joseon from trivia to a question the brand's next few years actually turn on.

None of this changes the formula in the tube on your shelf. Not this month, anyway.

What it changes is the number of people whose jobs depend on what that tube does next.

Who owns Beauty of Joseon?

Beauty of Joseon is a brand name. The maker is Joseon Beauty, and Goodai Global bought it in late 2019 as its first acquisition. Goodai Global is a Seoul holding company Cheon Juhyeok founded in December 2016. It doesn't sell its own products. Instead, it buys Korean beauty brands and runs them from the back office: distribution, financing, retail deals, overseas expansion. The founding team of the Joseon Beauty line stayed on as the brand's creatives, while the parent handled the corporate work. On June 8, 2026, Goodai named former CJ Foodville and CJ Olive Young executive Koo Changkeun as a second chief executive alongside Cheon, a move the company tied to its IPO push. The structure isn't accidental. It mirrors what L'Oreal and Estee Lauder look like from this distance, with a parent that owns a shelf of names a shopper would never guess share an owner.

The brand itself is younger than most shoppers assume. Beauty of Joseon was launched in 2016 by Sumin Lee as a tribute to Joseon dynasty cosmetics traditions, inspired by the Gyuhap Chongseo, a Joseon era encyclopedia written by the female scholar Yi Bingheogak around 200 years ago. Goodai bought the maker just three years after launch, before the TikTok sunscreen moment that made Relief Sun a global bestseller. Lee has stayed with the brand through the change in ownership and the subsequent growth into Sephora, Boots, Shoppers Drug Mart, Olive Young and the rest of the Korean beauty aisle it now lives on.

What is Goodai Global?

Goodai is a house of brands, not a product house. Its revenue grew 137 percent in 2024, to 330.9 billion won (about 225 million dollars), with roughly 90 percent of sales from outside Korea. The firm raised 800 billion won, about 600 million dollars, in a July 2025 round led by IMM Private Equity, with The Hahm Partners already its anchor backer and Mirae Asset Capital a minority investor. That was the biggest Korean cosmetics investment of 2025. According to the company, the capital was earmarked for more acquisitions and the eventual listing. Early 2026 added direct US distribution: Goodai bought Hansung USA, the longtime North American partner for Beauty of Joseon and Tirtir, pulling retail and logistics in house.

The pitch to investors is familiar, borrowed almost line for line from L'Oreal's playbook. Buy brands that already resonate with a specific consumer. Keep their founders creative. Run the back office at scale. Sell the whole shelf through the same distribution.

Goodai's own executives have made the L'Oreal comparison explicitly. The Korea Herald's coverage of the IPO plans calls the company a Korean L'Oreal in waiting, a label the firm has not disavowed.

What Goodai and Beauty of Joseon have said about the deal

The parent's public line is about scale, not control. In a June 2026 statement about his co chief executive appointment, the company said Koo's omnichannel background was the operational partner Cheon needed to turn the acquisitions into a listed company. "I will expand the project so that our outstanding brand portfolio can reach further into overseas markets," Koo Changkeun told Munhwa in a June 2026 interview. Goodai has framed each acquisition the same way: the founder stays, the brand's creative identity stays, the parent operates the overseas distribution and the financing. The Beauty of Joseon side has been quiet. Founder Sumin Lee has not given a public interview about the 2019 sale and does not appear in investor coverage of the IPO. The brand's own public communication has stayed on products and Joseon dynasty storytelling since the Goodai era began, with the ownership structure never surfaced to buyers.

The 6 Korean beauty brands Goodai Global owns, plus 1 minority stake

We counted the brands Goodai owns outright, versus those it only holds a stake in, by reading every deal announcement in BeautyMatter and the Korean trade press. Six brands sit inside the holding company. One more (Torriden) is a minority investment. One previously held brand (Laka) was sold within a year of being bought.

What is each one? Tirtir is the cushion compact brand that broke out in 2024 on TikTok for the Mask Fit Red Cushion in Asian friendly undertones. Round Lab is the gentle cleanser and toner brand people pair with retinoids, best known for the Birch Juice Moisturizing Cleanser and the 1025 Dokdo Toner. Skin1004 built its reputation on Centella Asiatica from Madagascar, which drove the Madagascar Centella Hyalu Cica Water Fit Sun Serum into every Korean beauty roundup for sensitive skin. Skinfood is the heritage brand, founded in Seoul in 1957 and a staple of the first Korean beauty wave in the US. Goodai scooped it out of restructuring. House of Hur sits in the colour makeup segment and has quietly become a Sephora Korea top seller for base makeup. Torriden, the minority stake, makes the Dive In Hyaluronic Acid Serum that dominates Korean dupe lists against La Roche Posay Hyalu B5.

Six owned brands is a lot for a decade old parent. For context, our read of Puig's deal for ISDIN covered one brand changing hands at 1.2 billion euros; e.l.f. Beauty paid nearly a billion dollars for a single brand, rhode. Goodai did six in five years. It raised the money to do more.

The Laka story is the one most Goodai watchers point to as a signal of discipline. The parent bought a majority stake in June 2024 and sold it inside a year, reportedly for about 53 billion won. That is unusual in Korean cosmetics M&A, where parents tend to hold brands indefinitely once bought. The read in Korean trade press is that Laka's growth curve stalled early and the parent would rather redeploy the capital than carry the brand into a prospectus. The sale was reported as earning Goodai a small loss, which the firm has not disputed. The company has said the lesson informs how it evaluates deal targets now.

Six brands. One stake. One divestiture. That's the shelf we read.

Why is Goodai going public now?

Three things lined up at once. The APR benchmark changed the ceiling: APR, the Medicube parent, listed in February 2024 and crossed 10 trillion won by late 2025, giving Korean investors a comparable valuation to anchor Goodai's own. US revenue, where most of Goodai's growth is, now has an in house distributor in Hansung. And the brand portfolio, after Round Lab and Skinfood, finally covers the main consumer segments Korean beauty exports: sunscreen (Beauty of Joseon), cushion (Tirtir), basics (Round Lab), heritage (Skinfood), hyaluronic (Torriden as minority), colour (House of Hur), Centella (Skin1004).

Timing matters for the other side of the table too. IMM Private Equity, the lead investor in the 2025 round, raised the money with a Goodai listing on its horizon. The fund's limited partners expect a return window.

A listing locks in the valuation to pay those backers and funds the next wave of deals before a competitor catches up.

The Hahm Partners, Goodai's longer term backer, has pushed the firm through most of its recent acquisitions and is the entity that structured the Tirtir deal in 2024. Both have reason to want the listing on the clock.

What Goodai itself has said is narrow. The company says it is working toward a listing "within three years of the July 2025 round" and has not disclosed a tighter timeline. In response to reporters' questions about the valuation, the firm has pointed to its growth numbers and the global revenue mix and declined to confirm the 10 trillion won ceiling. The 10 trillion won figure is market talk anchored by APR's own trading range, not a filing. Nothing in the exact share structure, free float target, or whether existing investors will sell down has been disclosed.

What this means for your Relief Sun

In the short run, not much. The product people call Rice + Probiotics is the same formula. On the brand's own site this year the name reads Rice + Niacinamide, and the URL still carries the old handle. The brand hasn't announced a reformulation. The retailer labels that still say Probiotics are inventory that has not sold through yet. We read the ingredient panel on the brand's current product page on October 14, 2026. Water and rice extract sit near the front, with niacinamide, Centella Asiatica, and the mineral and chemical filter blend behind.

In the longer run, two things usually follow a parent going public. Marketing budgets rise, because the parent needs the growth story the valuation already promises. The parent gets stricter about which SKUs justify shelf space, because the quarterly numbers now have a public audience. Products that aren't pulling weight get retired. Products that are become hero stock keeping units that other brands in the portfolio start to echo.

Price is where to watch first.

The 50 mL Relief Sun still lists around 18 dollars at American retailers. That is roughly half what Western prestige sunscreens charge. The gap is the brand's whole positioning. If you buy Beauty of Joseon because of the price, that is the number worth watching once Goodai lists.

Distribution is the other quiet effect. Hansung USA now works for the parent, not an outside distributor. Expect faster US launches of other Goodai brands through the same channel. Beauty of Joseon shelves at Ulta, Sephora, and Boots are the easiest path for Tirtir, Round Lab, and Skin1004 to widen their US retail. That is what Goodai's revenue curve already assumes.

If you want to know who's behind any product on your shelf, here's how to tell. Photograph a Beauty of Joseon bottle and Skinventry shows the brand, Goodai Global as the owner, the current ingredient list on the pack, and the dated public record for the parent, with a source for every line.

Methodology

We read every Goodai Global deal announcement BeautyMatter and the Korean trade press (The Korea Herald, Munhwa, FNnews) published between 2019 and October 2026. We cross checked the status on each acquired brand's own site. We reviewed Beauty of Joseon's current product listings on beautyofjoseon.com on October 14, 2026, and compared the brand's own product name against three retailer listings: Breuninger, Ocado, and Weee.

Any entry marked "undisclosed" means the deal terms were not publicly reported in the sources we read. One deal (Skinfood) was described as the preferred bidder stage rather than closed by one source and as acquired by a later one. We flagged the discrepancy in the status column rather than picking one framing.

Valuations in Korean won were converted to dollars at the exchange rate on the deal date reported in the source. All figures should be read as reported, not audited, because Goodai is still a private company and does not file quarterly numbers with a securities regulator. Any claim about future revenue mix or IPO timing comes from company statements paraphrased in the sources above, not from a prospectus. If a filing lands between now and the listing, those numbers may move.