Hannaru Brings Korean Indie Beauty Brands to Eurasian Buyers at BeautyEurasia 2026

In Istanbul, Hannaru’s team hands Eurasian buyers samples from Korean makers that are not in the hall — every product is also listed on the platform

ISTANBUL, TURKEY, September 3, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Buyers in Turkey, the Balkans and Central Asia have had a longer route to Korean beauty than their counterparts in Western Europe or the United States. Fewer Korean brands hold standing distribution in the region, and outside the few days a year when a trade fair is in town, a retailer in Istanbul or Almaty who wanted to compare five Korean skincare lines has generally had to do it from a PDF and a shipping quote.

This week those buyers are handling the products instead. Hannaru, a business-to-business sourcing platform for Korean cosmetics, is exhibiting at BeautyEurasia 2026 in Istanbul through Sept. 4, in the Korean pavilion at the Istanbul Expo Center. The team did not come to write orders on the floor. It came with the Naru Box.

The Naru Box is the platform’s sampling program: full retail product rather than sachets, gathered from several Korean brands into a single tracked shipment so that a buyer can test before committing to any minimum order. At the stand the box has been emptied onto the counter. Visitors open the products, feel the texture, read the label, and only then ask what a wholesale order would look like. The card on the counter states the sequence plainly: touch it first, order second.

Most of the makers whose products sit on that counter are not in the hall. Hannaru’s catalog is built from Korean brands that sell steadily at home and carry little distribution abroad, and for a company that size a booth in a foreign exhibition is a serious wager — the stand fee, the flights, three days in which to be found. Sending samples with a team that is already going costs a fraction of that, which is why a sales team rather than the brands themselves is the party standing in Istanbul.

Who walked up to the counter made the point. In the show’s first two days the team took contact details from more than 140 retailers and distributors from 31 countries — a little over half of them Turkish, the rest spread across Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Bulgaria, Egypt, Nigeria and two dozen other markets, most of them places where Korean beauty has no standing distribution for a buyer to join.

“A trade fair gives a buyer three days and a small brand one chance,” said Sungjin Kim, CEO at Hannaru. “We came to Istanbul so that people could hold the product. The part that matters is that it is still there after we pack up.”

That second half is what separates the stand from the rest of the hall. Every item a visitor picks up in Istanbul is listed at hannaru.com with the maker’s own specifications, so a buyer who scans the code at the counter can keep comparing, message the brand manager directly and request the same samples after the exhibition closes. The sampling catalog currently holds 75 samples from 21 Korean brands, among them Laboreve, whose Peach Microbiome line sits on the counter in Istanbul, and the skincare label LEPS. Individual samples carry $11 to $66 in retail value, and a filled box holds up to about $300 of retail product. Most samples are free, and a buyer pays one published flat shipping rate for the whole box rather than a separate freight bill for every brand.

Behind the sampling program sits a catalog of 513 products from more than 250 verified Korean brands across skincare, makeup, haircare, body care and fragrance. Listings carry volumes, packaging dimensions, HS codes, minimum order quantities and certification data supplied by the brand itself, and buyers filter by the regimes that decide whether a product can be imported into their own market at all.

BeautyEurasia is organized by ICA Beauty under the supervision of the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey, and is the largest beauty trade fair in the region. According to the organizer, its 2025 edition drew 13,314 professional visitors from 114 countries along with more than 600 hosted buyers from 69 countries, spanning Turkey, the Middle East, the Balkans and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Retailers, distributors and e-commerce sellers can browse the sample catalog and build a box at https://hannaru.com/naru-box.

About Hannaru

Hannaru (formerly knok) is a Korean beauty B2B sourcing platform connecting global retail buyers directly with Korean cosmetic brand owners. The platform provides verified brand profiles, direct messaging with brand managers, catalog and price list access, minimum order quantity and certification data, meeting scheduling, and the Naru Box sampling program. Hannaru is operated by KMONDS Corp and is based in South Korea.

Jean-Baptiste
Hannaru
jean-baptiste@hannaru.com

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