What Koreans in Their 20s and 30s Really Gift — A Data-Driven Look at Gift Culture and a Seoul Shopping Guide (2026)

In Korea, gifting is close to an everyday language for maintaining relationships. In 2025 alone, roughly 189.5 million gifts were sent through KakaoTalk Gift. That works out to about 540,000 per day. The generation at the center of this is the 20-to-30-something crowd, and what they give and what they actually want to receive are strikingly different. Below is a data-driven portrait of Korean gift culture among twenty- and thirty-somethings — and a practical guide for travelers who want to buy the same gifts in Seoul.

How do Koreans in their 20s and 30s give gifts?

Most gifts are sent inside KakaoTalk, never handed over in person. To understand Korean gift culture, you have to start with KakaoTalk Gift. From inside a chat, you pick an item, send it to the other person, and they receive a mobile voucher — redeemable in-store or, for physical goods, shippable to an address they enter themselves. No meeting up required. No need to even know their address.

The scale is significant. According to data Kakao released for January 1 through December 17, 2025, the platform logged roughly 189.5 million gift transactions, with over 8,700 brands and some 640,000 products available. In a country of 51 million people, that is about 3.7 gifts per person per year.

The core user base is sharply defined. In a September 2025 survey of 512 men and women aged 20–59, purchase experience in the last month broke down as follows: women in their 30s (77%), women in their 20s (75%), men in their 30s (66%), men in their 20s (54%). Compare that to men in their 40s (14%) and men in their 50s (4%), and it is clear that this culture belongs overwhelmingly to the 2030 generation.

The timing is equally distinct. 84% said they use it for special occasions, while only 23% said they send gifts spontaneously (multiple responses allowed). In other words, Korean gifting is less about impulse and more about making sure something arrives on the right date.

How much do people typically spend on gifts?

The ₩20,000 and ₩30,000 bands hog the distribution. The same survey broke down the average single-purchase amount as follows.

💳 KakaoTalk Gift average single-purchase amount (September 2025, n=512)

Amount	Share
₩20,000s	35%
₩30,000s	29%
₩10,000s	18%
₩50,000s	8%
Under ₩10,000	6%
₩40,000s	3%
₩100,000+	1%

The ₩20,000–30,000 bands alone account for 64%. This is the sweet spot — what Koreans in their 20s and 30s consider a thoughtful but no-pressure gift. Spend less and it looks half-hearted. Cross ₩50,000 and the recipient starts worrying about how to reciprocate.

That said, these numbers describe the friend-and-acquaintance gift bracket. Anniversary gifts for a partner operate on an entirely separate budget (see below).

What do they actually buy?

Exchange vouchers, by a mile. The survey’s purchase-category breakdown (multiple responses allowed):

🎁 KakaoTalk Gift purchase categories (multiple responses allowed)

Category	Share
Exchange vouchers (coffee, chicken, etc.)	58%
Gift cards (cash-value vouchers)	51%
Beauty	46%
Food	35%
Fashion accessories	11%
Health supplements	10%
Digital & electronics	3%

And here are the top five most-sent exchange vouchers on KakaoTalk Gift in 2025:

One detail worth pausing on: digital and electronics sit at just 3%. The everyday gift among Korean twenty- and thirty-somethings is not something that lasts — it is something consumed quickly and enjoyed in the moment.

---

But what they want to receive is different

The giver wants to avoid failure. The receiver wants proof that you know them. This gap is the most interesting thing about Korean gift culture.

The giver’s logic is written plainly in the data. When asked how they browse for gifts, 51% said they check the most-sent ranking, and 24% said they look at the real-time trending list. Only 11% said they consult the most-satisfying-to-receive ranking. In other words, most people pick what everyone else is buying — because the odds of getting it wrong are lower.

The receiver’s taste shows up in a different dataset. Look at the platform’s self-gifting (send-to-me) top 10 for 2025: #1 was Dior Beauty, with Prada Beauty at #6, and niche fragrance brands like Byredo and Le Labo broke into the upper ranks for the first time. Dyson (#3) and Casetify (#9) also made the list. When someone else is paying, people trade coffee vouchers. When they are spending their own money, they buy perfume and phone cases. The silhouette of what people actually want to receive looks more like the self-gifting list.

Fragrance market growth backs this up. Euromonitor estimates the domestic Korean fragrance market at roughly ₩1.18 trillion in 2025, up 6.7% from ₩1.106 trillion the year before, with a projected ₩1.357 trillion by 2028. On 29CM, a fashion platform with a heavy twenty-to-thirty-something user base, fragrance transaction volume jumped over 84% year-on-year in October–December 2025.

What people prioritize when choosing a fragrance is revealing. In an Open Survey beauty trends study of 1,000 women nationwide, the #1 consideration was whether it matches my taste (67.9%), followed by whether it fits the image I want to project (39%). Not brand recognition. Not price. Identity. That is why fragrance is the hardest gift to get right — and the one that scores highest when you do.

What is the difference between gifts for friends and gifts for partners?

The budget and the physicality are different. For friends, the standard is the ₩20,000–30,000 exchange voucher described above. For a partner — a 100-day anniversary, a one-year anniversary — both the budget and the form step up. Card-company big-data guides suggest ₩150,000–250,000 for a 100-day celebration (for two) and ₩300,000–800,000 for a one-year anniversary.

The difference in form matters even more. For friends: consumables. For partners: something that lasts — or an experience.

👥 Gift grammar by relationship (as of 2026)

	Friends & colleagues	Partners
Standard budget	₩20,000–30,000	₩100,000+, depending on the occasion
Representative items	Coffee & delivery vouchers, Olive Young, cake	Fragrance, jewelry, wallets, hotel stays & travel
Delivery method	Sent via KakaoTalk	In person, with a handwritten letter
What failure looks like	Voucher expires unused	They do not like it, it feels low-effort
Recent trend	Small, cute, low-cost items: character keyrings, stationery	Experiences over things: hotel staycations, exhibitions, workshops

On the partner side, the clearest recent shift is the rise of experience gifts. The logic: picking the right object is hard, but a day spent together cannot fail — and it photographs well. That last part matters.

On the friend side, the opposite is happening: small, cute, low-cost items are in ascent. As the culture of hanging character keyrings off bags and posting proof shots has spread, ₩5,000–10,000 keyrings, stationery, and character goods have become the standard non-birthday gift — a tiny token that says this made me think of you.

When do people give gifts the most?

Korea’s gift calendar is bigger on Pepero Day than Valentine’s Day. Here are the days in 2025 that saw the highest single-day gift volume on KakaoTalk Gift.

📅 Days with the most gifts sent in 2025 (KakaoTalk Gift)

Rank	Date	What the day is about
1	November 11 · Pepero Day	Exchanging stick-shaped chocolate-dipped biscuits. Two years running at #1
2	February 14 · Valentine’s Day	Chocolate. In Korea this began as a day for women to give to men, but that distinction has largely dissolved
3	May 15 · Teachers’ Day	For teachers, professors, and tutors
4	March 14 · White Day	Candy. The reciprocal day to Valentine’s
5	Day before the college entrance exam (mid-November)	Gifts of yeot (taffy) and chapssaltteok (glutinous rice cake) — sticky foods that symbolically help exam scores stick

If your travel dates overlap with any of these, you will see convenience-store and Olive Young shelves transformed into seasonal gift displays. The week before Pepero Day alone turns every convenience store into a spectacle.

---

What should travelers buy in Seoul?

The safest approach: follow the same grammar Koreans use when gifting each other. Here is the breakdown by budget.

🛍️ Budget-based recommendations — modeled on what Koreans actually give

Budget	What to buy	Where
~₩10,000	Character keyrings, stationery, mini accessories	Daiso, Artbox
₩10,000–20,000	Lip balm, hand cream, sheet mask sets	Olive Young
₩20,000–30,000	Beauty singles, hand cream sets, dessert sets	Olive Young, department-store food halls
₩30,000–60,000	Niche fragrance miniatures & diffusers	Seongsu & Myeongdong fragrance flagships
₩60,000+	Full-size fragrances, jewelry	Department stores, brand flagships

Olive Young — the default for beauty gifting

The fact that Olive Young is the #4 exchange voucher on KakaoTalk Gift tells you everything about its place in the ecosystem. With beauty accounting for 46% of gift purchases, beauty is simply the default gift category in Korea. For travelers, Olive Young is also convenient: the large-format stores in Myeongdong, Hongdae, and Gangnam often have foreign-language assistance and instant tax refunds.

📍 Open in Naver Map

Daiso — cute things under ₩10,000

The stronghold for keyrings, stationery, and character goods. A huge share of the small, no-pressure gifts Korean twenty- and thirty-somethings hand to friends comes from here. Most items are ₩1,000–5,000, so you can knock out gifts for a whole group in one trip.

📍 Open in Naver Map

Seongsu-dong fragrance flagships — what people actually want

The fact that niche fragrance brands crowded into the self-gifting top 10 means perfume sits near the top of the wishlist hierarchy. Seongsu-dong has a dense cluster of both domestic niche fragrance brands and global flagships — just sniffing your way through them can take half a day. If a full bottle feels like too much, the miniature, hand cream, and diffuser lines land in the ₩30,000–60,000 range and make excellent gifts.

📍 Open in Naver Map