Lalavla Brand Guidelines: GS Watsons, a 2018 Rename and a Heart for the Letter V

A Korean joint venture with a Hong Kong name.

Lalavla was the health-and-beauty store chain run in South Korea by GS Retail, the GS Group retailer that also operates the GS25 convenience stores. It did not begin under its own name. GS Retail entered the business with Hong Kong’s AS Watson Group: Inside Retail Asia reported in February 2017 that the Watsons Korea partnership was launched in December 2004, and that GS Retail had run the chain under the name GS Watsons since its launch in Seoul in March 2005. Korean Wikipedia describes the venture as a joint arrangement with Hutchison Whampoa, the Hong Kong group behind AS Watson.

Growth was steady rather than fast. Inside Retail Asia counted 54 stores by 2011 and 128 by the end of 2016. Korean Wikipedia says the network was concentrated in the Seoul capital region and that control of management had rested with the Watsons side, which kept a cautious approach to opening stores.

That changed in February 2017, when GS Retail bought the remaining half of Watsons Korea from Watsons Holdings and took sole control, the Korean daily Dailian reported a year later; Inside Retail Asia had reported the planned buyout in February 2017. Once in charge, GS Retail opened stores quickly: the company said it had opened 60 new stores in the second half of 2017 alone, according to the broadcaster MTN.

With full ownership came a question about the name. A GS Retail spokesman told the JoongAng Daily, as quoted by Global Cosmetics News in February 2018, that after buying Watsons Korea the company had a choice whether to keep the original name or change it, and that after internal discussions “we ultimately decided to try starting anew.”

A name built on a rhythm.

On 6 February 2018 GS Retail announced that the Watsons stores would become lalavla, written 랄라블라 in Korean. According to NewDaily and MTN, which both reported the announcement that day, the name joins “lalala,” standing for cheerful news, and “blah blah,” standing for happy chatter; the company described it as a lovable and lively name built on a repeated, upbeat rhythm. Korean Wikipedia says the name was chosen through an internal competition among staff.

The logo was drawn around that rhythm. NewDaily reported that the English wordmark emphasised the repeated sounds of the name, and that a heart in the middle of the word took the place of the letter v. GS Retail said the heart stood for a balance between beauty and health and would serve as the chain’s representative image.

The positioning moved with the name. GS Retail aimed the new brand at shoppers in their twenties and thirties, NewDaily reported, and described the stores as “Beauty by Health” shops rather than places that simply stocked more beauty products and health foods side by side. The stores changed as well. MTN reported that interiors were made brighter and warmer than in the Watsons stores, with stronger lighting and more design elements. Sign changes began on 7 February 2018, and on 29 March 2018 Aju Business Daily reported that every store sign had been replaced and that the new identity was in place on the website and social media.

The relaunch also borrowed from the rest of GS Retail. Aju reported that the stores added parcel machines, installed and run by GS Retail’s logistics subsidiary CVSnet, so that shoppers could send purchases straight from the store, and an instant tax-refund service for foreign visitors, who scanned a passport at a dedicated scanner when paying, in districts such as Myeongdong.

How drugstore chains present themselves.

The guides in this group cover drugstore and pharmacy chains in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Their public face is mostly built from the same parts: a name over the door, a logo on store signs and shopping bags, and own-label beauty and household ranges named as the companies name them. The Austrian chain Bipa, for example, lists own labels such as BI CARE, BI HOME and LOOK BY BIPA on its company page.

Store formats differ more than the signs suggest. Some chains run compact neighbourhood shops; others mix several trades under one roof. German Wikipedia lists the departments of Müller, the Ulm-based chain, as running from drugstore and perfumery to toys, stationery, books and media. Store networks are published by the companies themselves or counted in dated press reports, so every number in these guides carries its year and its source.

Ownership is often less visible than the brand. Many chains sit inside larger retail groups: Bipa has belonged to the German REWE Group since 1996, and REWE International now lists it in Austria, Croatia and Romania. Others are still run by the company of the person who founded them, as German Wikipedia records for Müller. Corporate pages on founders, owners and retail groups are the starting point for these structures, and they are read here alongside encyclopaedias, registers and the trade press.

Identities change too. In January 2026 the Austrian trade site Leadersnet reported a new corporate design for Bipa, developed by BBDO Wien and built around a single capital B. Each guide sets out what can be checked about a chain — its founder, its owner, its network and its look — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A rename, a shrinking network and an exit.

The rename did not bring the growth GS Retail had described. Store counts differ by source and date: Dailian gave 188 stores in February 2018, and Asia Business Daily later said the chain had passed 200 stores by 2018. After that the network shrank. The Korean magazine Economist, in November 2021, gave 186 stores for 2017, 140 for 2019, 124 for 2020 and 97 in 2021.

The same Economist report said GS Retail had begun placing Lalavla inside GS25 convenience stores as part of a restructuring that cut the number of stand-alone shops. Korean Wikipedia records a similar turn in 2019, when the parent company moved its focus from opening stores to closing weaker ones.

On 10 August 2022 Asia Business Daily reported that GS Retail had decided to withdraw from the Lalavla business entirely. The paper said the online mall would stop in early September 2022 and that the offline stores were to be wound up by the end of November 2022, seventeen years after the Watsons Korea launch of 2005. A GS Retail official told the paper the company had decided to discontinue Lalavla in order to concentrate on future growth, and the paper cited difficulty in expanding the store count. Lalavla is treated in this guide as a closed brand.

The story leaves a compact identity case. The chain went from a borrowed international name to a coined Korean one in under two months, replaced every sign by the end of March 2018, and tied its whole wordmark to a single symbol, the heart standing in for a letter.

For a design guide, Lalavla shows how a retailer can swap a licensed name for a coined one and carry a whole identity on one symbol in place of a letter. Compare Watsons, whose Korean stores became Lalavla, and Matsumoto Kiyoshi, a Japanese drugstore chain. For this guide we use a berry, a blush and a plum ink with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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