Korea has just 51 million people and a GDP under 2 trillion dollars, yet it was the fifth-largest luxury market in the world in 2023 and continues to export culture, from beauty to fashion to retail experience, at a scale far beyond its size.

On this episode of Commerce Beyond Borders, Renee Hartmann and Chris Baker sit down with Dominika Kustosz-Lee, a Rethink Retail Top Expert for 2025 and 2026 with nearly two decades of experience across Korean e-commerce, luxury, and business development.

They dig into why Korean consumers move as one, how Olive Young became the infrastructure behind K-beauty's rise, why Seongsu is now known as Korea's pop-up capital, and what global brands consistently get wrong when they try to enter the market.

Roshni Nambiar, Senior Director of DTC Analytics & Strategy at Unilever Prestige Group, joins Renee Hartman and Chris Baker to unpack how AI, social commerce, and shifting discovery habits are reshaping the customer journey in beauty and CPG.

Roshni brings a rare full-circle view of e-commerce, having built marketing technology at companies like Oracle, run analytics for automotive brands at an agency, and now leading DTC and Amazon analytics across eight luxury beauty brands. In this conversation, she breaks down why the path to purchase has become a "zigzag line" with no predictable pattern, how TikTok and Instagram are outpacing legacy retail channels in growth, and why content, not tactics, is becoming the new currency of discovery as AI search and generative engine optimization take hold.

The conversation also digs into where agent-to-agent commerce is heading, what that means for brand loyalty and lifetime value, and why first-party data and a solid attribution model remain the anchor points brands need no matter how fast the landscape shifts.

In this episode:

• Why the post-pandemic e-commerce boom slowed in early 2025 and what's driving the rebound
• How TikTok and Instagram evolved from content platforms into product discovery and social commerce engines
• The difference between impulse-driven buying in color cosmetics versus retention in skincare
• Why authentic content, not SEO tactics, is becoming the key to visibility in AI-driven search
• Where the line sits between useful AI-generated content and content that backfires with consumers
• How agent-to-agent commerce could change the role of brand websites and reshape customer loyalty
• Why CAC to LTV ratio remains a non-negotiable fundamental, even as checkout increasingly moves to AI bots
• How fragmented discovery and checkout across platforms is breaking traditional attribution models
• Why clean first-party data is now essential for segmentation, personalization, and predictive analytics

About Roshni Nambiar Roshni Nambiar is Senior Director of DTC Analytics & Strategy at Unilever Prestige Group, where she leads customer analytics across .com and Amazon for a portfolio of eight luxury beauty brands. She previously led analytics for an automotive marketing agency and spent time at Oracle and various startups building marketing automation, CRM, and customer loyalty platforms.

Guest: Casey Lau, EVP at Web Summit and Co-founder of Startups HK

Casey Lau has spent close to 30 years in Hong Kong building community at the intersection of startups, tech, and global innovation. As EVP at Web Summit — which runs flagship events in Lisbon, Vancouver, Rio de Janeiro, and Doha — he has a rare vantage point on tech ecosystems around the world. He is also co-founder of Startups HK, a pillar of the startup community in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area.

In this episode Casey joins Renee and Chris fresh from a month-long tech tour across five Chinese cities — Shenzhen, Chongqing, Hangzhou, Beijing, and Shanghai — his first time back on the mainland since before the pandemic.

What we cover:

Casey's global view from Web Summit — why the only race that really matters right now is US versus China, and why Europe is watching from the sidelines

What shocked Casey most about returning to China in 2026 — from frictionless payments to the sheer pace of change on the ground

Inside the Geely/Zeekr factory — a dark factory the size of a city block with 1,000 people doing last-mile work while robots assemble cars that were ordered online just days earlier

China's generative video AI scene — why MiniMax, Seedance, Kling, and Alibaba's Happy Horse are the models people aren't talking about enough in the West

Pop Mart Land in Beijing — why Casey thinks Labubu has barely scratched the surface globally, and what a full-scale Pop Mart theme park looks like in practice

The F&B wave coming West — Heytea, Mixue, Luckin, and why Luckin buying Blue Bottle could spell real trouble for Starbucks

Why China is forward-looking and the West is backward-looking — and what that means for the pace of innovation and adoption

Chinamaxxing — why everyone at Web Summit Lisbon wanted to talk about China, and what the cultural shift toward Chinese brands, food, and culture means for global commerce

The one through line across every category Casey visited: speed of iteration that no one else in the world can match