HINCE's Own Flagship Stores Are Last to Get Its New Colors

HINCE's Spice Up Collection, four rose-and-brown-toned makeup lines built around shades named Roselle, Cinnamon, Bitter Rose and Bronze, goes on sale nationwide in Japan on October 13. But the collection's own release calendar, published by the Korean makeup brand alongside the announcement, shows a rollout order that runs opposite to what a map of the brand's own stores would suggest.

Everyone else gets there first

The earliest access is online, not in a store: HINCE lists an August 22 early release through the Japanese arm of Qoo10, the Korean-founded marketplace, nearly two months before the wider launch. The next access point is a temporary pop-up at Lumine Est Shinjuku in Tokyo, running October 1 through 12; it closes the day before the collection ships everywhere else. Variety retailers including LOFT and Shop In follow with an October 10 early release. Only on October 13, the date marketed as the collection's debut, do HINCE's own directly operated stores in Osaka and Nagoya receive it, alongside the brand's online shop, its storefront on the LINE chat app's gifting feature, and ZOZOTOWN.

That order matters because those two stores are not incidental to HINCE. The Osaka location, inside Lucua iL in Umeda, opened in May 2023 as the brand's first foothold in the Kansai region; the Nagoya store, inside Takashimaya Gate Tower Mall, followed in April 2024. Both outlasted HINCE's original Tokyo flagship in Aoyama, which the company closed in June 2024, folding that store's business into three remaining directly run locations, including the Shinjuku site now hosting the pop-up.

A market too big to leave to chance

HINCE's Japan business is not a side market. When LG Household & Health Care bought a 75 percent stake in Vivawave, HINCE's operating company, for 42.5 billion won in September 2023, the brand's most recent public figures showed sales split evenly between Korea and overseas, with Japan accounting for most of the overseas half. A brand with that much riding on Japanese shoppers has reason to court them where the coverage happens: a limited Tokyo pop-up generates the kind of foot traffic and social posts a standing suburban department-store counter does not, and an online marketplace date lets the brand start selling before any single city's calendar is set.

What that leaves unclear is whether Osaka and Nagoya shoppers, some of the earliest people anywhere to have a HINCE counter close to home, read the later date as a snub or simply do not track it the way a hype-driven Tokyo customer might. HINCE has not said, and nothing in the campaign explains the sequencing, only shows it.

Sources: hince Japan official store list · LG Corp press release