Picture it: you’re standing in a four-story skincare store in Myeongdong, and instead of rows of shelves, there’s a red sculptural tube spiraling up past the ceiling. That’s Laneige’s new Seoul flagship, and it just opened — designed by the Los Angeles-based studio PlayLab, Inc., with co-founder Jeff Franklin explaining the thinking behind every floor.
I haven’t been to Seoul in years, so I’m going on what the design team told me. But I’ve been following Laneige long enough to know when a brand is actually doing something different with customization — and this is it.
Why the store is built around experiences, not shelves
Laneige’s whole identity has been skincare science plus personalization. Most stores translate that into product displays. PlayLab did something different: they treated the bespoke services as the actual architecture.
“With the store spanning four floors, we aimed to use the bespoke skincare installations to create places for discovery, making each floor a unique experience and drawing people up through the building,” Franklin told me. Fair enough — if you’re already walking up, you might as well try the thing on the way.
His framing made sense the more I read it. “Skincare products are inherently small and can be eclipsed by their environments,” he said. “We wanted to make spaces and installations that portrayed the products’ unique attributes at the larger human scale.” That’s a better way of putting it than I could, but the point stands: a tube of lip mask doesn’t need a shelf. It needs a counter.
The three customization stations worth knowing about
This is the part I’d actually queue up for. Three main experiences turn Laneige products into services you can walk away from in your hand.
The Lip Sleeping Mask counter. It’s styled like an ice cream counter, and you pick from 10 scents — up to 45 combinations — to build a personalized mask. If you’ve ever done a lip mask routine at home, you already know why variety matters. Ten is a lot of options for one product, and that’s the brand’s whole argument in miniature.
The color consultation. A one-on-one session matches you with one of 150 Neo Cushion Glow shades — yes, 150 — and then a robot actually produces the compact for you. As someone who has watched shade matching go wrong in every store from drugstore to high-end, a 150-shade system with a machine finishing the job is the closest thing to a guarantee I’ve seen in a retail space.
The AI skin reading. It reads your skin and informs a customized Cream Skin formula, mixed on-site from 25 possibilities. I’m a little skeptical of every “AI” label in beauty — plenty of them are just a fancy scanner — but 25 distinct formula options is a concrete number I can hold. That’s how I tell the difference between marketing and method.
The red tube, and why the rest stays quiet
That red tube in the lobby isn’t a set piece. It’s the store’s connector — swirling up through every floor and out the roof, linking the spaces together. Against the softer interiors, it’s the one loud thing in the building, and that’s deliberate.
Everything else plays supporting role. Franklin describes Laneige’s identity as a “clean, comfortable aesthetic” with curiosity and science, so PlayLab kept the architecture soft — stone, metal, plaster, lacquer — and let each installation carry its own material and color identity inside one consistent framework. In plain terms: the room is quiet so the products can be loud.
Outside, a blue facade pushes back on Myeongdong
Myeongdong is one of Seoul’s busiest shopping districts, and Franklin describes the immediate surroundings as crowded and visually busy. The answer: a facade covered in blue tile, a clean bright counterpoint to the chaos, with soft attachment-like forms doubling as anchor points for seasonal decorations. You can see the pale interiors and open floor plates from the street.
For a store built around oversized gestures, the punchline is small and personal: in the end, your attention comes back to one thing. The product you walked in to get, made for you. The building just made it impossible to skip the journey.
FAQ
Where is the flagship, and when did it open? It’s in Myeongdong, one of Seoul’s busiest shopping districts, and it just opened — coverage came out days after launch.
Who designed it? PlayLab, Inc., a Los Angeles-based design firm. Co-founder Jeff Franklin was the quoted source for most of what I wrote here.
What can you actually customize there? A Lip Sleeping Mask from 10 scents and up to 45 combinations, a Neo Cushion Glow shade from 150 options produced on-site by robot, and a Cream Skin formula from 25 possibilities informed by an AI skin reading.
Is it a product store or an experience store? Both — but the architecture is built around the bespoke services first. The products are the reason the store exists, not the other way around.
A note from the studio
I’m not in Seoul this week, and I’ll be honest: this is a secondhand walk-through, sourced from PlayLab and the launch coverage. But after eight years testing products on my own vanity, I’ve learned to spot when a brand is committing to personalization instead of just labeling it. Laneige is committing. I’d queue up for that cushion robot in a heartbeat.
Tested on my vanity, not on my ego.
Sources: Design Milk — Laneige’s Seoul flagship by PlayLab. Photos: Han Sung Hoon and Image Bakery, via Design Milk. The original piece was developed with AI-assisted research and editing, with fact-checking by the Design Milk editorial team.