Manyo Brand Guidelines: A 2012 Korean Cleansing-Oil Maker That Dropped Its Colon

A 2012 company built around cleansing.

Manyo is the main brand of Manyo Factory, a South Korean cosmetics company founded in 2012, according to The Korea Times and the Korea Economic Daily. Its Korean name is 마녀공장. For most of its life the brand was written ma:nyo, with a colon in the middle; in May 2026 the Korean business site The Guru reported that the company had dropped the colon and confirmed manyo as its new brand identity, in Korea and then in Japan. The company said the simpler spelling would be easier for customers in different languages and cultures to recognise and pronounce.

The company grew around cleansing. The Korea Times wrote in June 2023 that Manyo Factory had become a “power seller” of cleansing oil products, and the Korea Economic Daily wrote in January 2025 that its main product groups were cleansing foams, cleansing oils and ampoules. Alongside the Manyo brand itself, the paper listed three others in the group: Ourvegan, a basic skincare brand; Vanilla Boutique, a brand built around scent; and Nomercy, a colour-cosmetics brand.

Ownership changed in 2018, when the company was taken over by L&P Cosmetic, the Seoul company behind the Mediheal mask-pack brand, and The Korea Times reported that L&P held 76.48 percent of Manyo Factory at the end of 2022. In July 2024 the same paper, interviewing L&P’s chairman at the group’s Seoul headquarters, still described Manyo Factory as a skincare brand of L&P Cosmetic that had made headlines by going public the year before.

In May 2023, during the share offering, The Asia Business Daily named Manyo Factory’s chief executive as Yu Geun-jik; he thanked investors and promised active communication with shareholders after the listing.

A KOSDAQ listing and a push into Japan and the US.

Manyo Factory went public on the KOSDAQ, the Korea Exchange’s secondary market, on 8 June 2023. The Asia Business Daily reported that the offering to institutional investors ran on 22 and 23 May and the retail subscription on 25 and 26 May 2023, with Korea Investment & Securities as lead manager. On debut day the share price closed up by the 30 percent daily limit, The Korea Times reported, adding that the offering had drawn heavy demand from institutional and retail investors alike. In the same report the paper named APR, the owner of Medicube, and the beauty retailer CJ Olive Young among the Korean cosmetics companies preparing their own listings for the second half of 2023.

Overseas markets, and Japan above all, then became the centre of the story. The Korea Economic Daily reported in January 2025 that Manyo Factory’s export sales were larger than its domestic sales. In Japan, the paper said, its products were sold through online channels including Rakuten and Zozotown and in about 6,300 shops, among them the discount chain Don Quijote. In the United States it had recently added two large retailers, the warehouse club Costco and the beauty chain Ulta Beauty.

In May 2026 The Guru reported that the Pure Soybean line, which it called the brand’s representative product, was at the front of Manyo’s renewed range in Japan, and that the company was widening its range from cleansing into other skincare categories.

The company’s US online store groups its range into named ingredient lines, among them Pure Soybean, Galactomyces, Bifida and Azulene, and sorts products by type, from cleansers and toners to serums, masks and sunscreen. Its Korean online shop uses the same ingredient families as a way into the catalogue.

Korean beauty, from conglomerates to start-ups.

The Korean skincare brands in this group introduce themselves through a small set of fixed elements: a short coined name, a plain wordmark, and product names built from a line name and a format, so that a toner, a cream and a pad from the same family share their first words. COSRX explains its name as “Cosmetics + Rx” and writes it in capitals; Dr.Jart+ glosses its name as “Doctor Joins Art” and, in a 2018 redesign by Pentagram, turned the plus sign into a mark for its different lines.

Export shapes how these brands appear. Their online shops speak to buyers in more than one country, and the dated press tracks how two of them reached shelves abroad: Dr.Jart+ entered the American market with Sephora in 2011, according to English Wikipedia, and Chosun Biz reported in 2025 that COSRX was sold in about 150 countries. Campaigns follow the same route, from outdoor screens in Times Square to K-pop ambassadors named in a launch.

Several have been bought by larger groups, and this guide describes those deals plainly, by date and stake. Amorepacific took a 38.4% stake in COSRX in 2021 and moved to 93.2% in 2023; Estée Lauder invested in Have & Be, the company behind Dr.Jart+, in 2015 and completed its purchase in December 2019. Where a brand remains independent, the guide says so only where a dated source does.

Each entry draws on corporate pages for founders, owners and export markets, and on dated independent press for anything beyond the company’s own word. Product lines are named as the companies publish them; the guide does not describe what the products do, and the palettes and typefaces shown are an unofficial interpretation rather than any brand’s own.

A new owner, then a new spelling.

Control of Manyo Factory changed hands in 2025. On 3 January 2025 the Korean private-equity firm KL&Partners signed a share purchase agreement to buy L&P Cosmetic’s controlling stake of 51.87 percent, the Korea Economic Daily reported, adding that the buyer had been drawn by the company’s overseas results and that due diligence was under way. The purchase was completed in May 2025, when KL&Partners took management control, The Guru reported in May 2026. As of January 2025 the company’s shares were listed on the KOSDAQ, according to the Korea Economic Daily.

The rebrand followed the change of owner. The Guru described it as a full overhaul of the logo, slogan and package design, carried out in Korea and then in Japan after the KL&Partners purchase. The most visible change was the logo: the colon that had split ma:nyo into two parts was removed, leaving manyo as a single lower-case word. The company also replaced its slogan and, in the site’s account, moved its positioning from a “clean beauty” frame towards what it calls “active beauty.”

The name needs care online. The domain manyo.com belongs to an unrelated Osaka maker of cutting and forging machinery with a similar English name, while the cosmetics brand trades through its Korean shop and a separate US store.

For a design guide, Manyo shows how much a single punctuation mark can carry in a wordmark, and what changes when a brand takes it away to travel more easily between languages. Compare Medicube, another Korean skincare brand that grew abroad through Japan and the US, and COSRX. For this guide we use a moss green, a soy cream and a warm clay with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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