Olive Young Put Hello Kitty in a Hanbok for Its Biggest Sanrio Collab Yet

CJ Olive Young — Korea's biggest health-and-beauty retail chain — kicked off "OLIVE YOUNG City Log" on August 30, 2026: a month-long Sanrio Characters collaboration scheduled through September 30. The scale is a real jump from last year: 81 brands are taking part, up 170% year-on-year, across 321 products, up 50%, according to the company. Beauty is the core of it, but Olive Young says the lineup now stretches into wellness and lifestyle products too.

The headline piece is a Hello Kitty redesigned around hanbok colors and features — and Olive Young was explicit about why: the company said it built the character with foreign visitors' interest in trying on hanbok in Korea in mind. It's the piece of the campaign most explicitly aimed at visitors from abroad — though Olive Young also expects its regional stores to work as tourist attractions for Korean and foreign visitors alike. The rest of the visual line leans toward Korean 15-to-29-year-olds, with school-uniform looks, pixel-graphic art, and leopard-print street style.

This isn't Olive Young's first character collab, either. Last July's Sanrio "tanning edition" campaign lifted sales at the participating brands by 60% year-on-year, according to Olive Young — a result the company cites as the reason it went bigger this year. Earlier in 2026 it also ran separate collabs with Manggeurojin Gom (a widely-loved Korean "ruined bear" character) in February and, in May, Pokémon, which drew 61 brands. City Log's 81 is bigger than that.

Beyond the hanbok design, City Log gives 12 Korean regions their own localized character art: Seoul, Busan, Suwon, Jeonju, Daejeon, Gangneung, Gongju, Gimcheon, Daegwallyeong, Boseong, Yeonggwang, and the island of Udo. Some pair the character with a regional specialty — Jeonju's version nods to bibimbap, Gongju's to its famous chestnuts, Udo's to its peanuts. Olive Young says the same regional art is being used on store exteriors and photo zones in those regions, so the collab isn't confined to the shelf. In its September 3 announcement, the company added that the hanbok Hello Kitty display would appear at two stores popular with foreign tourists, Gyeongju Hwangnam and Anguk Station.

Past the character art, the examples Olive Young highlighted look like existing product lines in special packaging. Skincare brand Arencia, for one, released two cleansers in a My Melody edition — its Fresh Green rice-cake-style cleanser, which comes with a My Melody card holder, and its Green Tea LHA deep-pore version, which comes with a face-wash band — as limited-quantity sets, alongside a special campaign discount. Arencia's own line is that the texture and cleansing performance stay the same and only the packaging changes, and that may well be the pattern across much of the campaign: existing products in a limited character wrapper rather than new formulas built around the tie-in (that's an inference from this example, not a claim about every product).

City Log is a nationwide campaign — in physical Olive Young stores and on the official online mall — with dates of August 30 through September 30, 2026. Olive Young's Seongsu flagship, Olive Young N Seongsu, also turned its first floor into an "OY City" experience space open through September 30. Olive Young also says the collab products are sold through its Global Mall in every region and, this year, through its new U.S. stores and online mall. The regional store exteriors and photo zones are the part that doesn't ship anywhere: seeing your city's specific design means walking into that region's store. The dates above come from Olive Young's announcements. The campaign is scheduled to end on September 30, and some gift-with-purchase items come in limited quantities, so treat this as a summary of what Olive Young announced rather than a shopping guide.