90 Days Before US Retail: What K-Beauty Brands Should Finish Before Spending on Ads

On August 20, nineteen K-beauty brands picked by Olive Young went into Sephora in the US. According to Olive Young, their average daily sales in late September were about double the August level. So what should a brand heading into a US launch do in its last 90 days? BAZZAAL walks through it in the order it prepares creator seeding in LA.

In short

• Sephora and Ulta look for K-beauty brands that already sell in the US. That sales record has to exist before the buyer meeting.

• Put ad money behind the seeding posts that caught on. Nobody can tell which post will take off until it is live.

• Twelve tasks from D-90 to D-1, in three blocks. Add your launch date and it works as a calendar.

  
  

  

Can you wait until the retail deal is signed?

The first thing you do after a retail confirmation email is open your Amazon page and look at how many reviews it has and how much you have sold on TikTok Shop. A Mintel analyst told Business Insider that Sephora and Ulta pick K-beauty brands US shoppers have already validated. The examples were Beauty of Joseon and Medicube, which both made their names on Amazon and social media first.

Medicube sold mainly through its own site, Amazon and TikTok Shop as of Glossy's May 2025 report, and Ulta added it just before Prime Day that July. According to a Market Defense report, Medicube and TirTir had until then been largely exclusive to Amazon in the US.

Beauty of Joseon put one sunscreen, Relief Sun: Rice + Probiotics, up front as its hero product. In a case study from the agency House of Marketers, the brand ran monthly collaborations with large creators and dermatologists. The content taught ingredients and routines, and the posts that performed got paid amplification. The agency reports the result as the number one sunscreen on Amazon and Sephora and 500 percent year-over-year sales growth across the US and UK.

Beauty of Joseon works with a few large creators over the long term, while gifted seeding sends product to many nano creators and tests. The approaches differ, but both put money behind content that has already shown a response.

With THOME, a device brand from athome, Sephora made the first move. athome's overseas sales lead told Asia Times Korea that Sephora reached out every quarter of 2025 and was turned down all four times. They could have taken the shelf right away, the lead said, but did not want to start half-ready.

In that year THOME improved the product and built a US sales team, logistics and its own online store. Its US sales last year came from that store and TikTok Shop. athome says THOME's US sales this September were up 800 percent from a year earlier.

Creator content takes time to build up as well. The creator program BAZZAAL runs for SKIN1004 started in 2023 at 50 to 60 creators a month. By 2025 and 2026 it was around 400 a month across Instagram and TikTok. Over two and a half months this spring, 313 creators published 453 posts that reached 3.6 million people.

Why build seeding content before spending on ads?

In MEDIHEAL's Amazon Prime Day seeding, eight featured posts passed 1.25 million combined views with no paid media. One of them drew 493,000 views by itself.

Seeding first means you don't have to pick the ad creative up front. Viewers pick it, and the budget goes there. A gifted post still belongs to the creator, though, so you need the creator's permission before it runs as an ad.

One skincare brand BAZZAAL runs seeding for collects each month's seeding posts in one sheet. When the brand's team picks a video it wants to run as an ad, BAZZAAL asks that creator for 30 days of usage rights. If the creator wants a fee, that gets worked out then.

On TikTok, that permission comes as a Spark Ads authorization code. The creator issues the code, and the brand runs the post as an ad with its likes and comments intact. The creator chooses whether the code lasts 7, 30, 60 or 365 days.

How much does boosting change the response? According to Traackr, Medicube's boosted creator content had an 8.23 percent engagement rate in April 2025, about eight times the 1.03 percent for content that was not boosted (Glossy).

Why does a TikTok Shop sales record matter before retail?

Charm.io puts US TikTok Shop beauty GMV at $980 million in Q2 2026, up 82 percent year over year. Medicube sold $62.8 million that quarter and Dr. Melaxin $38.8 million (Tubefilter).

But a Momentum Works report found that about half of the 803,500 US TikTok Shop stores, across all categories, made no sales in 2025. Inc. noted that the brands growing there arrived with a marketing budget, or a parent company to cover the ramp, already in place.

ELIOT says US retail buyers read TikTok Shop sales velocity as proof of local demand. WWD reported on October 1 that Dr.G, now owned by L'Oreal, is putting TikTok Shop first in Q4 because few Americans know the brand yet.

Measure Studio found that about 72 percent of a TikTok video's views come on day one, and views keep coming for about 35 days. Instagram Reels last 70 to 75 days.

That means new TikTok posts every week. ELIOT puts the pace at 8 to 12 new pieces of creative a month.

What goes on a 90-day pre-launch checklist?

Twelve items can feel like a lot. We counted back from launch day, D-0, and split them into three blocks. Regulation, which cannot slip, comes first. Content and the sales record come after.

D-90 to D-61: regulation and product

1. Responsible Person and FDA registration. Decide which manufacturer, packer or distributor is named on the label. Foreign facilities appoint a US agent and complete facility registration and product listing. Put a US address, phone number or website for adverse event reports on the label before production.

2. Sales route and stock. Settle a US entity or partner and US fulfillment. Amazon, TikTok Shop and your own site do not all need to open at once. Size safety stock for first-month sales plus seeding shipments.

3. Three to five hero SKUs. Choose what goes to the US first and rerun the margins. A toner, ampoule and cream that form one routine are easy to show on camera. Beauty of Joseon started with one sunscreen, and SKIN1004's creators presented three TECA products as a single routine.

4. English product pages. Start with the heroes. Write efficacy claims in the words US buyers use in their reviews instead of translating the Korean page.

5. Seeding onboarding. BAZZAAL starts client onboarding six weeks before a seeding campaign, because applications, screening, client approval and shipping take that long. For posts to start a month before launch, onboarding should begin around D-72.

D-60 to D-31: creator content

1. How many units to ship. Divide the content you need by the recovery rate. BAZZAAL's tally across past campaigns is about 70 percent. Thirty review videos means about 43 units, or 45 with a buffer, sent to creators who said they want the product.

2. Choose who gets the product. Gifted seeding offers product only, so most of the people who take part are nano creators. Their audiences are close enough in size that splitting them into tiers with different roles does little, so decide up front how you will pick each one. Use follower count only as a minimum, then check how recent posts are performing and whether the creator can show the product as part of their own routine. In MEDIHEAL's seeding, the posts that showed the masks inside actual skincare routines got the strongest response.

3. Eight to twelve new posts a month. Set up a creator roster, a brief you can reuse and a shipping flow. Build the brief around which skin concern the product is for and how to use it.

4. Affiliate commission. Set it by US category norms. ELIOT puts beauty at 15 to 30 percent. Open with one rate and adjust for the creators who sell.

D-30 to D-1: sales record and launch week

1. A weekly sales log. Each week, record Amazon review growth, TikTok Shop sales and US orders on your own site in one sheet. It goes straight into the buyer meeting.

2. Boost the posts that worked. Ask the creators of the strongest posts for usage rights and Spark Ads codes, and boost those. If you need new creative made for ads, commission it through paid creator partnerships.

3. A launch-week posting plan. In the paid collaboration BAZZAAL ran for Olive Young Global's spring sale, featured posts went up between February 26 and March 1, the first day of the sale. Plan launch week the same way, with unboxing and how-to videos live before day one and store visit videos following that week.

Frequently asked questions

Is FDA registration required before selling cosmetics in the US?

Facilities that make or process cosmetics for the US must register with the FDA, and the Responsible Person must list each product. Both have been enforced since July 1, 2024, and the label contact for adverse events has applied since December 29, 2024. The FDA says registration and listing are not an approval program, and it does not issue compliance certificates.

How many creators should we seed?

Work back from the content you need. At BAZZAAL's tally, about 70 percent of the products sent turn into posts, so 100 creators produce about 70 posts and 300 produce about 210.

Only a few of those take off. In Motion's 2026 benchmarks, which cover more than 550,000 Meta ads, about 6 percent of ads took most of an account's spend. In MEDIHEAL's seeding, 493,000 of the 1.25 million views on eight featured posts came from a single post. So set the headcount by how many ideas you want to test, not by how many posts feel like enough.

Send the same product with different angles, such as a routine walkthrough, a fix for one skin concern and a before-and-after. The more angles you test, the better the odds of finding the one that gets a response. Motion's data shows more winners as ad volume rises, and TikTok advises running three to five clearly different creatives per ad group. Seeding lets you run that test without ad spend, and each extra creator adds one more piece of creative you can use before launch.

When should we start running ads?

Once seeding posts are live and you can see which ones caught on. Get usage rights and a Spark Ads code for those posts, then boost them. THOME said its devices cost too much to seed by the thousands the way skincare brands do. A skincare brand has far more room to test through seeding first.

We put the twelve items on one page. Download the 90-day pre-launch checklist (PDF)

BAZZAAL runs creator seeding for K-beauty brands in LA. If you want to map this calendar onto your own launch, get in touch.

Sources 1/2: Sephora Newsroom, OLIVE YOUNG-curated K-beauty in the US (August 4, 2026). Chosun Biz, Olive Young K-Beauty Edit in four Asian markets (October 12, 2026). Business Insider, "A K-Beauty Turf War Is Brewing in the US" (October 2025). Asia Times Korea, interview with athome on THOME (October 7, 2026). Tubefilter, TikTok Shop beauty sales (July 29, 2026, citing Charm.io, Momentum Works and Inc.). ELIOT, TikTok Shop K-beauty US launch guide. WWD, Dr.G on TikTok Shop (October 1, 2026).

Sources 2/2: Measure Studio, TikTok vs Instagram content lifespan. TikTok for Business, How to create Spark Ads help article. FDA, Registration and Listing of Cosmetic Product Facilities and Products. Registrar Corp, MoCRA Responsible Person. ArentFox Schiff, MoCRA compliance alert. Motion, Creative Benchmarks 2026. Glossy, Medicube influencer marketing (May 2, 2025). Yahoo Finance, citing the Market Defense Prime Day report (October 17, 2025). House of Marketers, Beauty of Joseon case study. TikTok for Business, Creative best practices. All checked October 14, 2026. SKIN1004, MEDIHEAL and OLIVE YOUNG Global details are from BAZZAAL case studies; the recovery rate is from the BAZZAAL blog.

Related: How Many Creators Does a US Seeding Campaign Need? · Olive Young at Sephora: The 19 K-Beauty Brands and How They Were Picked · How to Sell K-Beauty on TikTok Shop US