Between Korea’s powerhouse beauty retailer Olive Young partnering with Sephora and Korean department store Shinsegae unveiling its three-month Hyper Ground pop-up in New York City, the stateside K-beauty boom is showing no signs of slowing down. In the race to tap into the U.S. market’s seemingly insatiable appetite for all things K-beauty, some Korean brands are enlisting Muskat Beauty Inc. — a Los Angeles-based K-beauty curator and distributor founded in 2025 — to help place them on major retail players’ radars.

While it may feel like a new K-beauty brand finds a home on an American beauty retailer’s shelves every day, there’s a calculated playbook behind this global expansion. After all, brands cannot merely copy-and-paste their Korea-specific retail strategies onto the U.S. market.…