Innisfree Brand Guidelines: A Yeats Island Name, Jeju Green Tea and a 2021 North America Exit

An Irish lake isle, a Korean island.

Innisfree is a skin-care and make-up brand owned by Amorepacific, the Seoul beauty group. Amorepacific’s history page lists its launch in 2000, and the Korea Herald wrote in December 2018 that Innisfree was “established in 2000”; Glossy, reporting in April 2019, said the brand first launched in South Korea in 2002. The name comes from W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” the Korean design magazine Design Compass noted in 2023, although the brand’s own story was built around a different island: Jeju, off Korea’s southern coast.

That link to Jeju ran through the products from early on. When Innisfree opened its first flagship store in downtown Shanghai in April 2012, the Korea Herald reported that some of its products used ingredients grown on Jeju and that a recent skin-care line used green tea leaves from Amorepacific’s own tea garden on the island. In 2023 the Korea Times listed Jeju green tea and volcanic ash among the raw materials the brand had long used.

The island also became a place to visit. In March 2013 the company opened Innisfree Jeju House on Jeju, which the Korea Times described that May as a building with wooden ceilings and floors and glass walls on all four sides looking out over green tea fields and forest. Visitors could eat light meals, make their own soap bars and buy items not sold on the mainland, among them a tangerine perfume made from local produce, the paper reported. The same article placed Jeju House alongside Amorepacific’s Osulloc tea museum on the island.

By December 2018, the Korea Herald reported, Innisfree had a presence in 13 countries, including China, India and the United States, with 667 stores outside Korea at that date.

Three logos in five years.

Innisfree’s identity has been redrawn several times, and each change was reported. In October 2018 Marketing-Interactive reported a new minimalist logo, applied from 1 November 2018 to advertising, customer communications, product design and the exteriors and interiors of stores. The new mark dropped the earlier symbol, which the company described as a basket holding nature, and the company said its deep green was drawn from the bija forest of Jeju.

Months later the packaging followed. Glossy reported in April 2019 on a global rebrand that began with the green-tea line on 1 April and was to reach all nine skin-care lines by the end of August, then make-up, body and hair care. The changes were subtle, the magazine said: on one green-tea cream the logo was removed from the cap, the product took on a deeper green, and the brand’s mark, which Glossy described as the outline of a green-tea leaf, was made smaller. Stores, then known for walls of living plants, were to move to brutalist-style concrete interiors with greenery and LED screens.

The larger break came in 2023. Design Compass reported in February 2023 that Innisfree had unveiled a new logo mixing upper- and lower-case letters, replacing the flowing deep-green lettering of the previous identity; the magazine’s critic was unconvinced by the new wordmark. The Korea Times reported in March 2023 that the brand had moved away from its “Jeju Island” concept and created a virtual island called “New Isle” for marketing aimed at younger consumers.

The new look then reached other markets. Cosmetics Business reported in March 2024 that the Amorepacific-owned brand had a new logo, slogan and packaging, and was repackaging its entire product line.

Korean beauty, as the companies present it.

Korean beauty brands tend to present themselves through the groups that own them as much as through their own names. Two companies own many of the labels in this guide. Amorepacific, whose history page dates its founding company, Pacific Chemical, to 1945, lists brands including Sulwhasoo, Laneige and Innisfree on its corporate website. LG H&H owns lines such as The History of Whoo, Sum 37 and O HUI, according to the Korea Times in 2023. Other names covered here are run by separate companies, and each guide states its owner as dated sources give it.

The companies publish a good deal about themselves. Corporate history pages give launch years, founders and owners, and brand pages set out philosophies in the companies’ own words; those claims are attributed in each guide rather than repeated as fact. Where a launch date differs between a company and the press, both versions are given.

Much of the visual identity is set out in shops. Korean trade and daily press have reported flagship stores in detail: a lantern-themed building in Gangnam, a hanok store in Bukchon, a glass-walled visitor house among Jeju’s tea fields. Logo changes are reported as news too, with new wordmarks, colours and packaging announced to the press and rolled out across products, advertising and store interiors.

Export markets shape the story. Brands covered here have opened stores in China, Hong Kong, Australia and North America, and some later closed them; the Korea Herald, Korea Times and Korea JoongAng Daily have covered each move. Campaigns often pair a named range with a celebrity ambassador or a cultural partner, and each guide names those only as dated reports do.

Shanghai, Melbourne, New York and back.

Innisfree expanded abroad and later closed stores in some markets. According to the Korea Times in May 2021, the brand entered China in 2012 and at its height operated more than 600 stores there, half of them run directly by the company; it had closed 140 stores there by the end of 2020, the paper said.

Other markets followed. Innisfree opened its first store in the United States, in New York, in September 2017, the Korea Times and Glossy both reported, and by April 2019 it had three American stores, two in New York City and one in New Jersey, according to Glossy. In December 2018 the Korea Herald reported the opening of its third Australian store, at the Chadstone Shopping Centre in Melbourne, six months after the first; the company said the store’s decor reflected the brand’s focus on ingredients from Jeju, and some 650 products could be tried there.

The North American stores did not last. On 7 May 2021 the Korea Times reported that Amorepacific would close all its Innisfree stores in North America as of that Saturday, after announcing the exit in a conference call in December 2020. Ten stores in the United States had shut in February, and in Canada stores at the Toronto Eaton Centre and Markville had already closed, with Yorkdale and Scarborough Town Centre to follow. The company said Innisfree products would still be sold through Sephora.

When Cosmetics Business reported the brand’s new logo and packaging in March 2024, it described Innisfree as Amorepacific-owned; the group’s own brand list also includes Sulwhasoo and Laneige.

For a design guide, Innisfree shows how a brand built on one place can redraw itself around an invented one, and how often a mass-market identity can change in a few years. Compare its group sibling Sulwhasoo and its parent, Amorepacific. For this guide we use forest green, leaf and mist with a rounded geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Innisfree’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.