About Yumebana
Yumebana is a wholesale marketplace pairing LA-metro day spas and independent estheticians with verified Korean indie cosmetic brands that aren't on Sephora US, Amazon US, or any LA wholesaler. These are brands with thousands of verified Korean buyer reviews and a clear domestic following — but, until now, no clean path to a US spa shelf. Reaching them previously meant 2–3× reseller markup, counterfeit-prone Amazon listings, or a Korean importer who'll only quote you a 60-unit case.
What Yumebana does
- Verifies both sides. Every Korean brand is checked against the Korean tax office's public business-registration database. Every LA-cohort buyer uploads a CA seller's permit (or equivalent state business license) and EIN. The status of each brand's FDA cosmetic registration is shown on its brand page.
- Holds payment in escrow. Stripe Connect holds the buyer's payment until the buyer confirms receipt of the goods. Funds settle to the brand in Korean won via Wise at the mid-market exchange rate.
- Brokers — never operates. Brands ship factory-direct from their own Korean warehouse. The US buyer is the importer on the US side, qualifying for 0% duty on cosmetics under the Korea-US trade agreement. Yumebana never holds inventory, never acts as the importer, never runs customs, never operates a warehouse.
- Mediates disputes. Seven-day return window on defective arrivals; fourteen-day Trial Pack free returns. Yumebana mediates each claim and allocates refund cost by cause (manufacturing, shipping, or buyer error) per a published policy. Brands don't face surprise chargebacks.
Who runs it
Yumebana is operated by Steven Kwak (곽병권) — Korean native, with prior work in Japan and the United States. The operator handles Korean, English, and Japanese directly and reads Chinese. There is no agent layer between brands and buyers — every founding-group brand and every LA spa works with the same person. No translation tax, no relay, no support tier.
For the pre-launch cohort, every buyer verification and brand listing is handled personally. If you write to steven@yumebana.com, a real person reads it.