Amazon sets 2027 target of 200 new Korean hair-care products

By Tom Whitfield

Amazon Global Selling Korea will target 50 Korean hair-care brands and 200 new products in 2027. Project Silk Road anchors the push, one of four programs the platform announced for next year.

CEO Shin Hwa-sook presented the plan Tuesday, Oct. 27, at Amazon Beauty in Seoul 2026. The conference took place at the Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas in Gangnam District, southern Seoul. Twenty of the planned products are due to launch before Amazon’s Prime Day sales event in 2027.

Amazon Global Selling Korea has not disclosed the participating brands, product formulas, selection criteria or support package. The dates are targets, not guaranteed releases. The company also did not specify where all 200 products would launch, although another 2027 program focuses on Amazon’s US store.

That program uses expansion targets, rather than audited market forecasts, to define success, and it supplies no sales value, sell-through forecast, margin structure or regulatory timetable.

What does this change for Korean hair-care brands?

It gives Korean hair-care brands a defined route into Amazon, where Korean sellers’ beauty sales nearly doubled from January through September compared with the same period a year earlier.

Amazon frames K-beauty as a small but fast-growing presence in the US scalp-care market. Shin said about 44 percent of K-beauty products sold in the United States are bought through Amazon. That figure covers K-beauty products broadly; it does not isolate scalp care or hair care. No underlying sales value or methodology accompanied it.

Shin put the hair-care market at roughly the same size as skin care. She put K-beauty’s penetration in that category at only about 1 percent. Those estimates point to a small base for growth. They do not establish how much revenue 50 brands or 200 products can generate.

Her store visits do not constitute a formal retail audit. During a day in the first week of August, Shin visited four stores in Los Angeles. She said end caps once devoted to makeup and skin care now displayed dozens of hair products that initially looked like skin care to her.

“The way we play in skin care has gone straight into hair,” Shin said. “Customers who used to wash their hair with shampoo and conditioner now care for it step by step.”

That move from two-step washing to staged care could favor ampoules, serums and treatments. The announcement did not name ingredients or specify which hair types and textures the products address. Shelf placement can signal demand. It cannot, by itself, predict repeat purchasing.

What early sellers show

Lilyeve, operated by Bitelab, reported more than 500 percent sales growth from January to September after joining Amazon in 2025. Its scalp ampoule sells about 30,000 units a month on the platform.

Bitelab supplied those figures. The company did not disclose revenue, the prior comparison base or whether growth came from units, price or both. The ampoule’s monthly volume gives scale, while the percentage alone does not show the revenue, margin or durability of that growth.

Amazon separately reported that sales of the PDRN scalp serum from Adapt’s brand epais rose about 700 percent during the Prime Big Deal Days event in early October. Amazon compared that event period with the previous week. It provided no absolute unit or revenue figure, and a one-week promotional jump does not establish a sustained annual rate.

Adapt owns epais. PDRN appears in the product name, but the announcement gives no formulation detail or claim about scalp conditions. It gives salons no basis to assess professional use, ingredient positioning or expected retail pricing.

What the four programs promise

Project Silk Road is the hair-care program. The three other programs announced for 2027 extend beyond scalp care into seller revenue, brand infrastructure and a wider European rollout.

• Help 50 new sellers each reach $1 million in first-year sales on Amazon’s US store.
• Give seven leading brands dedicated supply-chain and marketing support.
• Launch about 100 Korean brands in Europe.

The US goal concerns seller revenue, not product profitability. Amazon did not disclose cost assumptions, assistance levels or the sales-period definition for each seller. The seven-brand support package lacks stated content, spending limits and performance conditions. The Europe target names no destination countries, categories or launch timetable.

“A craze cools down at some point, but if we set the standards and keep widening them, it won’t disappear easily,” Shin said.

She did not define those standards or identify who would set them. The practical test begins with the first 20 releases before Prime Day 2027. Brand selection, wholesale terms, trade availability and measured repeat sales will offer the first evidence of whether K-beauty scalp care can move beyond promotion-led growth.