Where Did the Road Shops Go (2026): Reading Myeongdong Through the Rise and Fall of Missha, The Face Shop, and Skinfood

Why Aren’t There Any Road Shops Left in Myeongdong?

The road shops didn’t fail and leave empty storefronts behind — other businesses moved in and paid higher rent to take those spots. Myeongdong’s vacancy rate in Q1 2026 was 5.6%, well below the 8.8% average across Seoul’s six major commercial districts. The streets aren’t empty. The tenant mix has simply changed.

A road shop is a store that sells products from a single brand — the industry calls it a single-brand shop. It started with Missha. Launched in 2000 as the online mall Beauty Net, the brand opened its first offline store in 2002 in front of Ewha Womans University, positioned around the then-astonishing price point of ₩3,300 for cosmetics. It was Korea’s first-ever cosmetics brand shop. Within a decade, that model had blanketed the streets. By the mid-2010s, Myeongdong’s main strip was a landscape of Etude House, Missha, Innisfree, and Tony Moly layered several deep on a single block.

The Collapse in Numbers: Franchise Stores Drop to One-Third in Five Years

According to the Korea Fair Trade Commission, cosmetics franchise stores nationwide fell from 2,876 in 2019 to 1,356 in 2022 — more than halved in three years. The decline didn’t stop there, and the trend is starker in government statistics than in any individual brand’s press release.

📉 National Cosmetics Retail Store Count (as of April each year)

In three years, 4,427 stores (−11.3%) have disappeared. All this while K-beauty exports hit record highs — the domestic offline storefront was shrinking even as the world was buying more Korean cosmetics than ever.

Zoom in on franchise stores specifically and the drop is even steeper. Cosmetics franchise locations fell from 1,071 at the end of 2023 to 957 at the end of 2024, down 10.6%. The opening rate over the same period was 3.8%, the lowest among major wholesale and retail categories; the closure rate was 15.9%, among the highest. Average revenue per franchise also fell 12.6%, to ₩201 million. Almost nobody is opening new stores. Stores are only closing.

What Happened to Each Brand

🏷️ The First-Generation Road Shops: Four Brands — Peak vs. Now

The Face Shop — The Market Leader That Killed Its Own Stores

The Face Shop was the number one single-brand shop by market share in 2013, and as of November 2015 it was running 1,208 domestic and 1,792 overseas stores. It was the brand that sold the most and had the most locations among all road shops.

And then, in July 2023, it walked away from the franchise business entirely. LG Household & Health Care converted all 406 franchise contracts across The Face Shop and Nature Collection from “franchise agreements” to “product supply agreements.” Store owners were no longer obligated to sell only LG H&H products — and in return, The Face Shop signboards came down. The remaining offline presence takes the form of Nature Collection, a multi-brand shop that carries several LG H&H brands under one roof. In effect, the brand voluntarily turned its own stores into a multi-brand shop.

Today, The Face Shop’s growth story isn’t in Korea — it’s in North America. The brand’s “Rice Water Bright” line, built around the concept of rice-water cleansing, landed in Target stores across the US and moves about 33,000 units a month on Amazon North America.

Missha — The Last Directly-Operated Store Closes in August 2026

Missha is the prototype — the country’s first cosmetics brand shop, launched in 2000. The arc of its retreat is laid out plainly in its regulatory filings.

After posting an operating loss of ₩19 billion in 2018, the company declared a pivot to premium. It raised single-product prices into the ₩40,000–50,000 range by boosting ingredient claims and signed Elizabeth Olsen as its global ambassador. But the low-end road shop image clung stubbornly, and the abrupt upmarket turn sowed confusion. When COVID-19 hit, the 2021 operating loss ballooned to −₩22.4 billion.

What followed was clarity. Cut domestic offline by more than half. Shift the weight overseas. Domestic stores ticked down methodically: 407 in 2020 → 294 in 2022 → 273 in 2023 → 269 in 2024 (89 franchised, 180 directly operated).

Then, on December 11, 2025, Able C&C filed a disclosure announcing its exit from domestic directly-operated stores and duty-free. Duty-free operations ended December 31, 2025. Directly-operated stores are closing sequentially as individual leases expire, between December 13, 2025 and August 24, 2026. The franchise network will remain. The decision came in the brand’s 25th anniversary year.

Skinfood — From Corporate Rehabilitation to ₩80 Billion in Revenue

Skinfood’s fall wasn’t just about the market. In 2018, it came to light that a former CEO had embezzled approximately ₩12.2 billion in company funds. The brand entered corporate rehabilitation that October — a moment that came to symbolize the collapse of the first-generation road shops.

In 2019, private equity firm Pinetree Partners acquired the company: Skinfood for ₩177.6 billion plus its subsidiary iPeerlis for ₩22.4 billion, totaling ₩200 billion. Franchised stores dwindled from 37 in 2020 to 22 in 2022.

The recovery didn’t run through physical stores. It ran through Olive Young shelf placement, cross-border e-commerce (CBT), and vertical platforms like Zigzag, Ably, and Musinsa. The brand identity — “Don’t eat it, give it to your skin,” anchored by the Black Sugar and Propolis lines — stayed intact. Only the channel changed. 2024 revenue hit ₩78.1 billion (+32.6% YoY), operating profit ₩10.4 billion. The upward trend continued into 2025, pushing revenue past the ₩80 billion mark.

Nature Republic — Evicted from the Most Expensive Land in Korea

This is the most symbolic closure in Myeongdong. The site of Nature Republic’s Myeongdong World Store held the nation’s highest official land price for 23 consecutive years. The 2026 standard land price: ₩188.4 million per square meter — about ₩622 million per 3.3 square meters, the Korean equivalent of a pyeong.

📍 Open in Naver Map

Where the Customers Went — Olive Young and Pharmacies

If cosmetics spending had shrunk as much as road shops did, Myeongdong would be empty. But Myeongdong is packed. In Q1 2026, inbound foreign visitors hit roughly 4.76 million — an all-time high. The money is still there. Where people spend it has changed.

🔄 How Myeongdong's Ground-Floor Tenants Changed

Olive Young posted ₩5.83 trillion in 2025 revenue, up over 20% year-on-year. Nationwide, it operates 1,367 stores as of Q2 2026, and nine of them are in Myeongdong alone, sitting within a 1–3 minute walk of each other. The model of comparing hundreds of brands and tossing them into a single basket has become the standard, replacing stores that sold only one.

Large pharmacies are Myeongdong’s new face in the mid-2020s. Stores like Ready Young and Very New sell cosmetics, health supplements, and over-the-counter medications side by side, displayed for self-browsing with a shopping basket in hand — the Olive Young approach, applied to a pharmacy. As of March 2026, pharmacy visits made up 68% of foreign medical consumption transactions. As cosmeceutical buzz spreads through social media, “pharmacy shopping” has become a built-in stop on the Korea travel itinerary.

Daiso is an axis you can’t ignore either. Tony Moly launched its sub-brand Bon Sep’s Daiso-exclusive color cosmetics line with 19 SKUs and has since expanded to 40, with cumulative sales topping 3 million units. The company’s revenue from new channels — Daiso, exports, and others — surged 145%, from ₩11.8 billion in 2024 to ₩28.9 billion in 2025. The price point that road shops were built on — cosmetics for ₩3,300 — didn’t disappear; it just migrated from the road shop shelf to the Daiso rack.

📍 Open in Naver Map

So Is This a Collapse or a Migration?

Look at store counts alone and it’s a collapse. Stores shrank. One brand went through corporate rehabilitation. Another is in total capital impairment. But fold in the financials and a different picture emerges.

💰 First-Generation Road Shop Operators: Recent Results (2025)

A pattern emerges. The companies that moved fast to shut down offline stores and switch channels came back profitable. The ones that held onto their stores slid into capital impairment. Tony Moly slashed its road shops from 400 to about 90 — and revenue grew 24.5%. It reorganized its remaining stores around tourist-heavy commercial districts and redirected the savings into Daiso and exports.

Innisfree traced the same curve. Revenue dropped from ₩768 billion in 2016 to ₩599 billion in 2018, and domestic franchise stores fell again from 234 at end-2023 to 190 at end-2024. In response, it redefined its packaging and brand tone — from “naturalist sensibility” to “nature-based high-performance” — to fit the multi-brand shelf.

What disappeared, in the end, isn’t the brands. It’s the way they were sold. The model where a salesperson stood under a single-brand sign and recommended products to you has been replaced by a model where you, the customer, roam aisles of hundreds of brands and compare them yourself. That one sentence explains why you no longer see road shop signboards on Myeongdong’s streets.