CJ Olive Young, South Korea’s leading K-beauty platform
CJ Olive Young pioneered South Korea’s first health and beauty (H&B) shop in 1999, and has been continuously setting the benchmark for the Korean beauty market ever since. By pairing a nationwide brick-and-mortar retail footprint with a mobile-first omnichannel platform, the company has driven the growth of the K-beauty sector. Having established itself as a must-visit shopping destination for foreign tourists, Olive Young is expanding its global flagship locations and transforming offline spaces beyond traditional points of sale into brand experience platforms. More recently, the company expanded onto Sephora in North America, taking the stage as a premier K-beauty platform overseas.
Caught between HQ and shops: the operational burden on area managers
Olive Young’s area managers (AMs) are at the core of the brand’s stable operations across 1,300+ shops across South Korea, as well as its omnichannel strategy. Overseeing multiple shops within an assigned region, AMs communicate directly with team members to manage sales metrics, conduct one-to-one check-ins, cascade HQ strategies and resolve shop-level issues. The catalyst for expanding Slack to retail shops came during on-site interviews conducted to assess IT environments in shops, where AMs repeatedly voiced similar pain points.
First was the fragmentation of communication channels. Conversations between HQ and shops, as well as between AMs and shop managers (SMs), were scattered across KakaoTalk, email, the internal intranet, OneNote and landline phone calls. Because business context was fragmented across disparate tools, teams had to search through multiple platforms every time they needed to trace past history. Furthermore, urgent notices sent as image screenshots became unsearchable over time.
Second was the notice dissemination path. Urgent announcements from headquarters had to cascade from HQ to AMs, and then from AMs down to shop employees. Caught in the middle, AMs had to reformat announcements to be mobile-friendly, transfer them to KakaoTalk, and then follow up to verify that each shop had implemented the requested action – making it difficult to focus on other tasks until everything was completed.
“Whenever we had to make urgent changes to product displays, we had to call each shop individually. We had to check if they had seen the notice, ask them to post their progress on KakaoTalk and, for AMs managing over a dozen shops, count whether every single shop had posted updates – then follow up with phone calls to those that hadn’t. Just finishing that follow-up process often took well over an hour.”
Third was the boundary between work and personal life. With work-related information flowing through personal messaging apps, it was far from an ideal environment for managing corporate data. Furthermore, Olive Young shops remain open until 23:00, while AMs clock out at 18:00. Because shop operations continue well after AMs have left work, work-related requests and personal messages continuously arrived through the exact same communication channel.
A 4.5/5 satisfaction rating in the pilot: The frontline embraced it first
To fundamentally address these challenges, Olive Young’s IT Strategy Team evaluated expanding Slack – which had already proven successful at headquarters – to shop employees nationwide. While reviewing various collaboration tools alongside Slack, the criteria were clear when viewed through the lens of the retail shop environment: it needed to provide immediacy, be intuitive and approachable for shop staff who are predominantly in their early 20s and, most importantly, accommodate diverse, established shop collaboration practices rather than forcing them into a rigid, uniform template.
The pilot results were decisive in moving forward with the rollout. Conducted in late 2025 with approximately 200 participants, the pilot included a wide spectrum of shop environments, such as geographically dispersed areas like Busan and Jeju, as well as high-volume flagship shops such as Myeongdong. In a five-point scale satisfaction survey, every category scored above 4.5. As the pilot came to an end, the frontline had just one question: ‘When can we start using it?’
Redefining daily shop operations with channels, canvases and huddles
AMs set up channels tailored to their assigned regions, shops and active projects, inviting both frontline staff and HQ team members. With communication unified on Slack, the first thing AMs do each morning is open Slack, review threads accumulated before starting work and address them by priority.
Seulgi Hong, an AM overseeing five shops across Busan’s Nampo-dong and Busan Station areas, organises channels by purpose: shop-specific channels, all-team channels and project committee channels. For instance, a dedicated channel was created for the ‘Cruise ship arrival task force’ in the Nampo-dong commercial district, enabling real-time collaboration with counterparts across the spatial implementation team, spatial design team, MDs and shop planning team.
Jisu Kim, an AM managing large-format shops in Myeongdong, organises key sales metrics, announcement logs and visual merchandising (VM) guidelines using Slack’s canvas feature. In the run-up to the quarterly Olive Young Big Sale, AMs must collect differing VM material requirements for each shop format – a process that previously required juggling between the internal intranet, OneNote and email, continuously compiling responses and tracking them until final confirmation. Consolidating this workflow into canvases and threads has cut the manual workload of compiling data by more than 50%.
The operational history preserved in Slack demonstrates its true value during staff transitions. Shop staff frequently rotate across locations, and AMs and team leads are also regularly reassigned. Previously, teams relied on handover documents written in Word, but now, the moment a person is invited to a channel, the entire history of shop operations and active promotions is instantly accessible. AM Seulgi Hong, who took on a new post ahead of the opening of Nampo Town – the largest town-format shop outside the Seoul metropolitan area – shares her experience:
“I was assigned to Nampo Town just ahead of its launch – the largest shop in Busan– so I had no prior context or history. In the past, it would have taken a considerable amount of time just to get up to speed. But my predecessor invited me to the channel, allowing me to read through the entire past record from the beginning. Thanks to that, we were able to pull off the opening smoothly.”
Due to the nature of shop shift work, gathering all team members in one place for regional meetings was challenging, so these were replaced with Slack huddles. AMs start a huddle at a scheduled time each week to exchange key shop issues and frontline updates within about 15 to 30 minutes. In areas like Busan that are sensitive to cruise ship arrival schedules, shop teams use these huddles to immediately share observations and on-the-ground atmosphere on the days when ships dock.
“Holding regional meetings in person created major logistical constraints around time and place, as we had to align everyone’s shift schedules and travel to a training centre. With huddles, there’s no travel involved and meetings wrap up in 15 to 30 minutes, which has significantly increased how often I communicate with team members. That simply wasn’t possible before.”
Emoji replace phone calls: an hour of work turned into a single click
Slack fundamentally reshaped how information flows. By bringing frontline shop staff into Slack, the notice dissemination path now connects headquarters directly to shop employees. Area managers can simply forward HQ directives using Slack’s forward message feature, and acknowledgment is tracked neatly through emoji reactions in regional channels. By pre-attaching ‘O’ for complete and ‘X’ for incomplete, each shop can respond with a single click, instantly highlighting which locations have yet to review the update. What once took well over an hour of phone calls is now resolved on a single screen.
Shop-level issues and IT program glitches are submitted directly through Slack workflows and the help desk. Furthermore, shop managers at mega-flagship locations have built upon standard workflows to create their own closing-checklist alert bots. At 22:30 each night, the bot checks in via the channel to ask if device (PDA) inventory has been counted, followed by a reminder at 22:45 to confirm if daily sales reconciliation has been submitted. These safeguards weren’t mandated from above – they were created proactively by the frontline teams themselves.
Key enquiries and Voice of the Customer (VOC) feedback submitted to customer support are channelled into dedicated swarming channels through the integration of Service Cloud and Slack. HQ customer experience (CX) managers, AMs and shop staff gather together in real time to assess the situation and align on resolution steps. A process that once required the shop to report to the AM, the AM to contact customer support and everyone to wait on email replies now happens within a single channel. Consequently, the turnaround time from a customer submitting an enquiry to receiving an answer has been dramatically reduced.
If the hours once spent rewriting notices, making phone calls and chasing follow-ups have vanished, where did that time go? AM Jisu Kim’s answer was simple.
“After all, we are a retail organisation. Now, we can dedicate much more time to our people.”
Data becomes more accessible, and evenings are restored
For area managers who spend much of their time on the move, having immediate access to critical metrics is essential. AM Jisu Kim pulls customer data for her assigned shops simply by querying the Tableau data bot directly within Slack.
“When I ask, ‘Show me the foreign customer breakdown by nationality for Myeongdong Town and Central Myeongdong Town,’ data detailing visitor proportions from Greater China, Japan, Southeast Asia and other key regions appears instantly. Even within the same Myeongdong commercial district, customer demographics by nationality vary slightly depending on the shop’s exact location. Being able to pull this data immediately without having to run Tableau separately has been a game-changer.” said Kim.
As work conversations consolidated into an enterprise-secure Slack environment, using personal messaging apps for work became a thing of the past. Communication with frontline shop staff was streamlined into either face-to-face interactions or Slack, leaving landline phone calls strictly for urgent matters. With work-related messages after hours and on days off no longer infiltrating KakaoTalk, employees successfully reclaimed the boundary between work and personal life.
“Shops close at 23:00, while I clock out at 18:00. Previously, if a shop-related message popped up while I was chatting with friends on KakaoTalk after work, it was impossible to ignore. Today, there is a clear distinction that all company messaging happens strictly on Slack, keeping my personal life and work cleanly separated” said Kim.
Slack also transformed the workplace culture within shops. In large-format shops, employees often work in different sections, meaning they rarely run into one another, even while on the same shift. Staff began creating custom emoji featuring colleagues’ faces captured during shifts and reacting with them in channels. Whenever a new hire summons the courage to post their first message in a channel, a cascade of cheering and heart emoji reactions immediately follows. This isn’t a company-mandated initiative, but a genuine culture built organically by the employees themselves.
“There are many young employees working at Olive Young shops, and for them, Slack has become a space to connect and engage. When a newly joined team member gathers the courage to post in the shop channel, everyone cheers them on with words of encouragement and heart emoji. Even without meeting face to face, it creates a space to show interest, celebrate and encourage one another, making it a fun and effective tool from an organisational culture perspective as well.”
Transforming the frontline: the impact of Slack
Through Slack, Olive Young seamlessly connected how frontline teams work into a single, cohesive workflow – spanning announcements, reporting, issue resolution, data retrieval, handovers and workplace culture. As a result, frontline operational speed accelerated, customer VOC resolution became significantly faster, and time that was once drained by repetitive manual tasks was redirected back to customers and colleagues.
Conversations and photos that once vanished or proved difficult to locate are now preserved in their entirety across channels and canvases. In a retail organisation characterised by frequent onboarding and rotational assignments, handovers remain seamless through historical records in channels and canvases, ensuring business continuity even when staff change. Above all, on-the-ground operational knowledge that once dissipated is now accumulated as a lasting organisational asset that everyone across Olive Young can reference at any time.
