‘Convenient beauty’: South Korean delivery app on its Vietnam’s cosmetics venture to diversify offerings

In April 2023, the food delivery app launched Lazy Bee - skin care and makeup brand catering to Vietnamese consumers. Its pipeline currently spans 11 products ranging from facial mist, toner pads, facial masks, cushion foundation to lipsticks.

Speaking with CosmeticsDesign-Asia​, Thu Huynh Thi Anh, brand manager of Lazy Bee, explained that Baemin launched its own beauty brand to diversify its offerings.

Women and men-alike are paying more attention to their appearance and investing more in beauty products, she added.

“Aside from food delivery, we have a Korean grocery channel and a youth merchandise channel. We have a big mission to provide a lot of convenience for our app users, and that’s why we wanted to diversify our product and service offerings to enhance our users’ experience and we decide to launch the Lazy Bee brand in Vietnam,” ​Thu explained.

Convergence of K-beauty and Vietnamese beauty​

Lazy Bee’s NPD and manufacturing are centred in South Korea, and its focus is developing multifunctional skin care and makeup products.

“We want to position ourselves as a convenient beauty brand. We have some products that are multifunctional, and want to offer that in convenient ways to customers.”​

Thu said that the typical Vietnamese skin lacks moisture and tends to be oily due to the humid climate and polluted environment. The most popular cosmetics include makeup remover, sunscreen, moisturizer, toner, and serum.

After accounting for Vietnamese skin characteristics, it claimed to take reference from K-beauty products to address the respective concerns. One of which is its toner pads.

“One of the symbolic K-beauty products is toner pads, but the Vietnamese market is not familiar with using it. We took the toner pad format and adjusted the ingredients to Vietnamese skin. We tell our customers that toner pad is from K-beauty, but the formula is customized for them to have better skin.”​

While K-beauty products also tend to contain active ingredients, Thu explained why Lazy Bee chose a different route: “A lot of brands put retinol or HA to their products, but we don’t put any active ingredients. ​

“Our brand is new in the market, and we don’t focus on treatment products. We are providing general and basic products for male or female consumers, and any skin type. Our products have natural ingredients like calendula and red ginseng which are from Korea.”​

Distribution plans​

Its most popular products are the calming and moisturizing calendula toner pad, natural fit soft skin cushion SPF50, and overnight reset mask with red ginseng and probiotics.

Currently, its products are only made available on the Baemin app to its users in HCM city, and Thu said that the team is working on honing the user experience on the app.

It is also currently organising on-ground activations in HCM city to allow people to try the beauty products.

The next aim is to launch online via Lazada, Shopee and TikTok Shop in the next few months. It will subsequently launch its offline presence in beauty retail chains such as Guardian and convenience stores.

It will expand to Hanoi this month, and is also working on providing nationwide shipping.