Gangnam Unni seeks to connect international customers with top beauty clinics

An advertisement for Gangnam Unni / Courtesy of Healing Paper

For those who have recently traveled to Seoul, there's a good chance of encountering posters featuring two women wearing futuristic eyewear, staring blankly ahead, plastered across billboards throughout the city.

The women featured are model Jang Yoon-joo and actor Jeon Jong-seo, promoting Gangnam Unni, an aesthetic medicine platform that connects those seeking cosmetic treatments with clinics. The name Gangnam Unni literally translates into “sisters of Gangnam,” referencing the affluent Seoul district known for its concentration of plastic surgery clinics, and evokes the image of women well-versed in beauty and self-care.

Regardless of debates surrounding cosmetic surgery or whether medical care should be subject to market forces — or even the stereotypes implied by the platform’s name — Gangnam Unni has emerged as a clear business success over its 10 years of operation, meeting the demand for greater transparency in beauty services.

According to regulatory filings from Healing Paper, Gangnam Unni's operator, the company posted sales of 53 billion won ($37.8 million) last year, up 27 percent from a year earlier. Operating profit also grew by 5.15 percent to 12.86 billion won during the same period. It successfully raised 42.8 billion won in a Series C round in February this year, and is set to invite more investors through additional fundraising events.

Gangnam Unni currently has 8 million registered users, including 1.3 million from Japan. The platform has handled 6.6 million consultation requests and is connected with 4,300 clinics and 9,400 registered doctors.

Healing Paper CEO Hong Seung-il poses during an interview with The Korea Times at Healing Paper's office in Gangnam District, Seoul, Sept. 25. Korea Times photo by Nam Hyun-woo

Gangnam Unni’s service is based on addressing the asymmetry in available medical information. In Korea, while most medical services are governed by government-controlled reimbursement policies, beauty treatments are largely driven by market principles. By sharing details of treatments, prices, and customer experiences, the platform helps customers make more informed choices.

“Our platform’s purpose is to help customers seeking aesthetic treatments make the most rational and suitable choices of clinics and physicians based on their preferences,” Healing Paper CEO and co-founder Hong Seung-il said during an interview with The Korea Times.

“For example, some clinics prioritize shorter surgery times and greater stability, which may require larger incisions, while others offer smaller scars with longer procedures and potentially reduced safety. Our platform is aimed at making such differences clear — through reviews, information pages and other features — so that customers can understand the context and make their own choices.”

Gangnam Unni's Japanese service / Courtesy of Healing Paper

Gangnam Unni’s growth has been driven by its model of providing users with free access to information that was once available only through in-person consultations at clinics, such as prices and procedural details. Due to this approach, Gangnam Unni has also invited criticisms that it may help reduce medical services to mere price competitions.

However, Hong, also a medical doctor, said that consumers’ choice of medical services is not determined by price alone. He emphasized that the key is to provide transparency not only in costs but also in what procedures and services are offered.

“In Korea, encouraging market logic in the reimbursed medical sector goes against the nation’s health care philosophy, and we also believe it is inappropriate,” Hong said.

“However, we have observed that mature medical markets have a clear distinction between treatments driven by necessity and those driven by desire, such as aesthetic medicine. That is why we are focused on the aesthetic medicine market, not only in Korea but also in other countries.” Hong said.

An advertisement for Gangnam Unni is displayed at Shibuya Station in Tokyo, in this May 2022 file photo. Courtesy of Healing Paper

The reason why Gangnam Unni is setting its sights on the global market is based on the unexpected global popularity of the app even before the company launched advertising campaigns.

Gangnam Unni launched its service in Japan in 2019, after noticing a significant share of traffic on its platform coming from Japanese users, because more Japanese consumers, particularly those living outside Tokyo, found it more affordable to seek services in Korea. The platform gained traction on Japanese online plastic surgery communities, where local users translated the app themselves and brought screenshots to Korean hospitals.

“We first planned cross-border business, connecting Japanese consumers with Korean clinics,” Hong said. “But the COVID-19 pandemic came in 2020, and that business model came to a halt. So we decided to acquire a local aesthetic platform (Lucmo), which provided the service with Japanese clinics, and merged the accumulated reviews into ours, which was a critical tactic.”

During this process, Healing Paper Japan CEO Yuta Kato played a pivotal role by affiliating more than 500 local clinics within a year — an achievement that had taken Gangnam Unni five years to accomplish in Korea. Since then, over 1,500 Japanese clinics have joined the platform, laying the groundwork for growth. With the resumption of cross-border services in 2022, the number of Japanese patients using the platform had increased twentyfold year-on-year by June 2023. Gangnam Unni is now the second-largest aesthetic platform in the Japanese market.

According to data from the Ministry of Health and Welfare, a total of 370,000 Japanese nationals visited Korea for aesthetic medicine last year, and 160,000 of them have consulted or reserved services with Korean clinics through Gangnam Unni. Separate government data shows that 3.32 million Japanese people visited Korea throughout 2024.

“The data shows that medical tourism has a significant impact on the market, and that Gangnam Unni is contributing to the growth of Korea’s aesthetic medicine sector,” Hong said.

In July, Healing Paper signed a memorandum of understanding with the Korea Tourism Organization to jointly run campaigns on Korean aesthetic medicine aimed at attracting Japanese tourists.

Healing Paper CEO Hong Seung-il speaks during an interview with The Korea Times at Healing Paper's office in Gangnam District, Seoul, Sept. 25. Courtesy of Healing Paper

Backed by its success in Japan, Gangnam Unni in December 2023 launched UNNI, a multi-language version of the platform, to expand its market to other countries. It is also seeing noticeable growth in user traffic in Thailand.

“The country’s aesthetic medicine market is highly matured,” Hong said. “Some cities even have more aesthetic clinics than convenience stores, and people invest heavily in such treatments.”

Hong said the company’s current focus is on Asian regions, due to geographical advantage for cross-border services, and will expand into other countries. Healing Paper currently has a corporate body in Japan and a liaison office in Thailand.

Despite successfully closing a Series C fundraising round — typically a stage for startups that have already proven their business model and are seeking full-scale growth and expansion — Hong said it is too early to speak about an initial public offering, adding he still considers the company to be in “a very early stage.”

“We are generating both revenue and operating profit, but we see the market as being far larger than where we are now,” he said. “If we only looked at the Korean market, our valuation would likely exceed that of an average Kosdaq-listed company, but our ambition is to become a company that dominates a specific segment on a global level.”