Sulwhasoo Brand Guidelines: Amorepacific’s Ginseng Line, From Sulwha to a Dosan Lantern

A ginseng story told in two versions.

Sulwhasoo is the herbal skin-care brand of Amorepacific, the Seoul beauty group whose own history page dates its founding company, Pacific Chemical, to 1945. The brand itself is much younger. Amorepacific’s history lists the launch of Sulwhasoo in 1997, and the Korea JoongAng Daily reported in October 2011 that the brand “was officially launched in Korea in 1997.”

Its back story is told in two ways. Amorepacific traces the line to ABC Ginseng Cream, released in 1966; the company says the founder was inspired by the ginseng fields around his home town of Gaeseong. When the Korea Herald reported on the brand’s new Seoul flagship in March 2016, it described a “Heritage Room” on how Sulwhasoo grew “from its foundation in 1966,” and in September 2026 the same paper noted the 60th anniversary of ABC Ginseng Cream.

The 2011 JoongAng Daily account gives a longer chain. It says Amorepacific researchers began work on ginseng-based cosmetics in 1967, that the company obtained a patent on a ginseng extract in 1972, and that the first product of that work, Ginseng Sammi, followed in 1973. Quoting the company’s chief executive, Suh Kyung-bae, the paper said Sulwha came out in 1987, combining ginseng with other herbal ingredients, and that the wider Sulwhasoo range was born in 1997. A company public-relations officer told the paper that the name means beauty comparable to a winter tree covered in snowflakes.

Both versions agree on the essentials: a brand built around ginseng, launched under its present name in 1997, and owned throughout by Amorepacific, which the Korea Herald in 2023 described as running Sulwhasoo as its luxury skin-care subsidiary.

Lanterns, hanok and a museum partnership.

Sulwhasoo’s stores have been reported in some detail. On 30 March 2016 the Korea Herald reported the opening of what it called the brand’s first flagship store, a four-storey building in the shopping district near Dosan Park in Gangnam-gu. The store took the lantern as its motif, the paper said, with shiny golden steel bars across the interior and exterior of a warmly lit building. Inside were the Heritage Room, a “Boutique” selling items sold only at the flagship, among them a Lantern Collection, floors for trying products, and a third-floor Culture Lounge for events.

A second Seoul flagship takes a different form. In November 2021 the Korea Herald described Bukchonro Osulloc in Gahoe-dong, beside the Bukchon Hanok Village: a tea house of Amorepacific’s Osulloc tea brand set in two renovated buildings, a western-style house from the 1960s and a hanok, a traditional Korean house, from the 1930s, with a small garden of antique stone pagodas. The space was designed by the architect Choi Wook of One O One Architects, the paper said, and the Sulwhasoo flagship sits in the hanok.

Gift wrapping has its own place in the stores. The Korea Herald reported in 2016 that traditional Korean wrapping was offered at the Dosan store, and in 2026 it described “Jihambo,” the brand’s gift-wrapping service inspired by bojagi, the traditional Korean wrapping cloth.

The brand has also worked with a museum. In March 2023 the Korea Herald reported that Sulwhasoo had signed a one-year partnership with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, linked to work on Korean cultural artefacts, and that an event at the museum on 29 March would bring together the brand’s global ambassador Rosé of Blackpink, the New York Korean restaurant Atomix and the Ambiguous Dance Company.

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.

Hong Kong, New York, Shanghai and Tokyo.

Sulwhasoo’s move abroad began in Asia. According to the Korea JoongAng Daily in 2011, the brand entered Hong Kong in 2004 and opened a Sulwhasoo Spa on Canton Road there in 2009. A Sulwhasoo store opened inside the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York in 2010, and the brand entered mainland China in 2011, the paper reported.

The latest market is Japan. On 11 September 2026 the Korea Herald reported that Sulwhasoo had opened its first official department-store pop-up in the country, on the first floor of the main building of Isetan Shinjuku in Tokyo, running from 5 September to 13 October. The brand had held an earlier pop-up through the beauty platform Cosme in May 2026 and an event with the Japanese beauty magazine Biteki Grand in August, the paper said, and it was also selling through Isetan Beauty Online, Qoo10, Amazon Japan and Cosme Shopping. As of September 2026, the brand operated more than 600 stores across 15 countries, according to the same report.

The products named in that coverage are the Concentrated Ginseng cream and the First Care Activating Serum. The Korea Herald tied the Isetan pop-up to the 60th anniversary of ABC Ginseng Cream.

Across these reports the brand appears in a series of places: a lantern-themed building in Gangnam, a hanok in Bukchon, an event at a museum in New York and a department store in Shinjuku, with wrapping based on bojagi cloth offered in its own stores.

For a design guide, Sulwhasoo shows how a skin-care brand can carry its identity through architecture, wrapping and heritage rooms as much as through packaging. Compare its parent, Amorepacific, and its group sibling Innisfree. For this guide we use lacquer brown, lantern gold and ivory with a calligraphic serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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