A shopping basket is a surprisingly good place to begin a founder story. Before Mihwa Kim had a brand of her own, she had the habits of an exacting buyer: compare the products, read the reviews, notice what the presentation leaves out. She says there were months when beauty purchases cost more than she earned. Most people would call that a budgeting problem. Kim eventually made it part of her professional education.
Today she is the founder and chief product officer of Biodance, the beauty brand operated by Seoul-based Beauty Selection. Her work links two questions that companies sometimes keep in separate rooms. What makes a product worth choosing? And how does the person who might choose it ever find it? Following her career means moving between the demonstration table, the distribution business and the product desk.
The route is interesting because she spent time building the middle. Before the brand came the machinery for getting products noticed. Before international shelves came experiments in how people buy. A founder’s story often races toward the launch. Kim’s rewards a pause in the years preceding it.
“My products are how I communicate with customers.”Mihwa Kim
The person beside the presenter
Kim worked in home-shopping television, including as a supporting presenter demonstrating products. Her job required precision under a camera’s scrutiny. She later recalled rehearsing until she could apply a sheet mask with her eyes closed. It is a small, almost comic accomplishment, but it captures the practice behind an apparently effortless demonstration. The viewer gets a few smooth minutes. Someone has done the awkward repetitions beforehand.
Television also gave her a close view of the distance between a product and its sales pitch. Explaining something well matters; having something worth explaining matters too. Those concerns would follow her into business. In 2017 she began a one-person Beauty Selection operation. The company incorporated in January 2020, with Kim as CEO. Selecting other people’s products gave her a practical starting point before developing her own.
A business built between brand and buyer
In her early account of Beauty Selection, Kim called it a distribution company. That description is useful. The business found brands and connected them with sellers who already had an audience. It dealt with the space between making something and getting it into a customer’s hands. A manufacturer could have a worthwhile product and still lack an effective introduction.
The company’s 2020 model included product research, content support, advice for sellers and logistics. Its research operation purchased and tried cosmetics before deciding what to offer. Choosing the right seller involved considering both the product and the people likely to buy it. The arrangement required work on each side of the match; putting two names on a campaign would hardly complete the job.
Kim was also assembling a team with experience beyond her own. Jae-bin Park brought a background in venture capital and Hyperconnect. Early recruitment included people with design and marketing experience at other businesses. For a founder accustomed to making judgments herself, the company was becoming a place where several kinds of judgment had to cooperate.
Trust has a delivery problem
Beauty Selection’s early commerce proposition rested on the relationship between a seller and an audience. In a 2020 interview, Kim described the difficulty of asking an influencer to find a brand and carry a sale through to completion. Random product promotion could disappoint both participants. The seller’s standing depended on the people listening; choosing poorly could spend something more valuable than a campaign budget.
The business therefore had to understand the audience as well as the merchandise. A product needed an appropriate introduction, and the introduction needed an appropriate person. That is a demanding version of distribution. It asks whether the recommendation fits the relationship in which it appears. The customer encounters a person she follows, while a company behind the scenes makes selection and fulfillment possible.
By 2022, the model included direct sales through the company’s own online stores. Customer responses during planning and after selling helped inform subsequent product decisions. The company had secured a ₩13 billion Series A from investors including Altos Ventures, KB Investment and Redbadge Pacific. Funding gave the operation room to develop; feedback supplied a reason to change what it developed.
- 2017One-person selection business
- 2020Beauty Selection incorporates
- 2021Biodance launches
- 2025–26More international retail doors
Giving another person the big picture
In September 2021, Kim handed the CEO role to Park. By 2023, her title was chief commercial officer; later coverage and the company’s current leadership page identify her as chief product officer. The sequence separates founding a company from permanently occupying its top management position. Kim kept a consequential role while the organization’s responsibilities changed.
That division remains visible in the company’s present account of its leadership. Park’s work concerns strategy, execution and team growth. Kim’s concerns products and customers. The company describes her continuing involvement in development and her habit of questioning whether an item is what the customer actually wants. A founder’s personal standard needs a place in a larger organization. Here it has a named responsibility.
She is still close to the work that gives the business something to sell. The appeal of this arrangement lies in its specificity. Product decisions require sustained attention even when expansion demands attention elsewhere. Growing a company adds conversations about markets, people and operations. Giving those conversations an owner can preserve room for the smaller, stubborn questions about the product itself.
The months behind a few hours on camera
Biodance’s development work involves repeated adjustments to the mask’s consistency, elasticity, fit and pace of change during use. Kim has described months spent refining those details. Product discussions and trials extend beyond the research department. Employees use the products, and she has said that a launch depends on an internal conviction that the item is good enough.
It is an unusually tangible way to understand her CPO title. A formula arrives as a business proposition, but people experience an object. They notice how it handles and whether it is pleasant to use. Those observations can be difficult to reduce to a presentation slide. They still matter to the person deciding whether to purchase another packet.
The brand’s masks visibly change from white to transparent during use. That physical transformation gives someone filming the product a sequence to show. A demonstration has a beginning and an end. Kim’s television experience makes an interesting companion to this feature: both involve making a product legible to an audience. The contemporary demonstration can take place on a customer’s phone.
Where the search lands
“Amazon was where the search landed, not where it started,” Kim said in a 2026 interview. Her distinction puts discovery ahead of the transaction. Someone sees a product being used, becomes curious and then goes looking. The retailer completes a journey that may have begun elsewhere. For the founder, that changes the question from how to be present on a platform to why someone would search at all.
Kim described Beauty Selection as preparation for Biodance: a way to test whether worthwhile products could reach consumers through trust. She launched the brand in 2021 after establishing that commercial foundation. The sequence gives her career a particular shape. Distribution knowledge accumulated before she asked a brand of her own to depend on it.
The business also learned to adjust its explanation across markets. Biodance entered Amazon’s US marketplace in July 2022. Park later described a change in presentation to emphasize the mask as an overnight product, after longer-use instructions had struggled to reach American customers. Product development and communication were both involved. An instruction buried in a listing can remain remarkably well hidden.
Company revenue, rather than Kim’s personal earnings. Figures reported in May 2025.
The shelf gets farther from Seoul
The reported 2024 revenue of Beauty Selection was ₩135.7 billion, compared with ₩41.6 billion the previous year. Those figures describe a company, with the work of many people behind them. They also make the scale of the founders’ original distribution question concrete. Reaching customers had become an international operation with production and retail demands to match.
Biodance arrived in Japan in 2025. In April 2026 it announced actor Masaki Okada as its first official Japanese ambassador. The company framed the appointment around building a lasting relationship with the market. A familiar public face provides another form of introduction. It belongs to the same commercial problem Kim had been considering years earlier, now in a different country and on a different scale.
Her own public work has broadened too. A documented appearance with Columbia Business School’s Korean Business Association and Beauty Club brought her founder story to students. The account emphasized testing ideas on a small scale before committing and the contribution of individual people to execution. It is a fitting topic for someone whose business grew through experiments in the distance between intention and purchase.
A demanding customer keeps her seat
In a 2026 ASOS interview, Kim discussed extending the brand’s hydrogel approach into additional everyday categories. She also singled out its Jelly Serum Mist when asked about an underrated product. Even with a recognizable mask in the foreground, the product officer was interested in what else deserved a look. A successful item can open a door. The next item still has to earn its welcome.
Kim’s career leaves the customer in a powerful position. The founder can choose the product, refine its presentation and find a place to sell it. The buyer decides whether any of that was worth her attention. For someone who began with demanding shopping habits, that seems an appropriate arrangement. She has moved to the other side of the transaction without forgetting the person holding the basket.