“At That Time, I Decided to Invest” is a column where active investors share why they chose to invest in a startup.

When I first met the Maycoders team at the end of 2021, the K-Beauty market was not as hot as it is today. There was still skepticism about whether K-Beauty could establish itself as a true global standard. But even then, I believed its globalization was inevitable, for several reasons:

1. The popularity of Korean content was rising in the West, and global demand for Korean consumer goods was increasing.

2. Korea’s cosmetics manufacturing infrastructure is world-class, and if the barriers to distribution could be lowered, the K-Beauty market would expand significantly.

3. Cosmetics trend cycles were accelerating, and distribution environments kept changing. Indie beauty brands — more agile than traditional players — could respond faster to consumer tastes and distribution shifts, and grow quickly.

Three years later, Korean cosmetics exports have reached an all-time high ($7.4 billion in Q3 2024). K-Beauty is now moving beyond China, expanding strongly in the U.S. and Japan, and receiving love calls worldwide. This growth is largely driven by small and mid-sized online indie brands. Yet, Korea’s penetration in the North American cosmetics market is still just 1%. Global K-Beauty is only just beginning.

The Maycoders team I want to introduce today operates SEOUL4PM, a K-Beauty cross-border wholesale platform, and MAYK, a platform connecting global sellers to K-Beauty manufacturing in Korea. I met them three years ago, and today I believe they’ll lead the next K-Beauty paradigm. They are innovating K-Beauty distribution and manufacturing for “long-tail e-commerce sellers” — in countries and segments others ignore — using IT to solve problems in ways others never tried.

SEOUL4PM: Targeting Small Online Buyers Ignored by the Big-Player Model

Cosmetics distribution and manufacturing naturally gravitates toward large brands and buyers. For brand owners and distributors, it is more cost-efficient to handle bulk orders from major buyers. Small online buyers with lower volumes often struggle to secure products at good prices or get proper support. In non-core regions for K-Beauty exports, the problem is even worse due to the lack of local staff.

Uniquely, Maycoders began not with big buyers, but with small e-commerce sellers in the Philippines, launching SEOUL4PM. If trade processes had been handled manually, ROI would never have been viable. But Maycoders automated most of the brokerage trade process with IT. Even with increasing order volume, no extra staff were needed — ROI remained intact. At the time of investment, the company, with just 3 staff, controlled 25% of online K-Beauty distribution in the Philippines.

More recently, they developed a system to automatically pool small orders into bulk group orders, allowing small sellers to purchase at prices close to those of major buyers.

Today, Maycoders provides cross-border wholesale to over 2,000 small buyers across 70 countries. Unlike traditional offline buyers, who depend heavily on a few markets like North America, Japan, or ASEAN, Maycoders has a balanced distribution across regions. Thanks to this coverage, SEOUL4PM is now often the first to see which K-Beauty brands are gaining traction worldwide.

MAYK: True Democratization of Cosmetics Manufacturing

Beauty products have fast turnover cycles — even faster in online channels. Buyers constantly want to discover new brands. But most distributors focus on a few famous names, making it hard to find fresh brands.

Maycoders, on the other hand, has secured over 200 brands — about twice the SKU coverage of Silicon Two. With uncertain demand, this would normally be impossible. But Maycoders uses accumulated global inquiry data from sellers to decide which brands to onboard. Brand owners, too, often learn about unexpected overseas demand through Maycoders and join the platform. Today, SEOUL4PM holds the largest portfolio of long-tail brands in distribution. For brands that even major vendors cannot source, large buyers now turn to SEOUL4PM.

Buyers with established sales channels often want to create their own brands to improve margins. This is how MAYK started: from a seller inquiry via SEOUL4PM. For overseas small sellers, accessing Korea’s OEM/ODM infrastructure — apart from the two giants, Cosmax and Kolmar — is nearly impossible due to language and administrative barriers. MAYK connects sellers with small and mid-sized OEM/ODM manufacturers, supporting the entire production process through its IT product.

Thanks to this convenience, while typical B2B purchase conversion rates hover around 2%, the rate of sellers who go as far as placing a deposit via MAYK is more than 10 times higher. It may soon give rise to the next “Beauty of Joseon” success story.

Crossing Borders by Code: An IT Team Without Cosmetics Industry Experience

Interestingly, Maycoders’ founders had no prior K-Beauty experience. CEO Choi Sae-mi and CTO Hong Seok-jin both studied computer science at university. As outsiders, they faced many challenges, but that also allowed them to think outside the box. If they had come from the industry, they might never have focused on small buyers or used SEO to acquire customers at near-zero cost.

Skeptics still ask: “Can you really succeed by focusing only on small buyers?” or “How big can online distribution actually get?” To me, such questions are rites of passage for paradigm-shifting teams. We are at the beginning of a paradigm change in the Korean beauty market. Pioneers of new paradigms always take paths others ignored, prove them with results, and eventually inspire a wave of fast followers.

Brands like Skin1004, which broke into North America’s Amazon beauty category, and Beauty of Joseon, which rode TikTok influencers to success in the U.S., are examples of pioneers that overcame skepticism.

I believe we are entering an age where K-Beauty, especially through online channels, will become extremely long-tail. The probability that yesterday’s #1 product will stay #1 tomorrow is shrinking. Already, Amazon’s beauty category top 10 rankings change rapidly. This means the era of distributors reliant on a single brand, a single country, or a single buyer is ending. Platforms like SEOUL4PM, capable of covering the long tail, will lead the next paradigm.

Until the day Maycoders becomes the #1 distributor in the next K-Beauty era, I’ll keep running alongside them.

*This article was translated to English for International buyers. The original Korean article can be viewed here.