Olive Young

Olive Young scales K-beauty worldwide: Accelerating Global retail-tech leadership and 100% uptime with Cloudflare

Since launching South Korea’s first health and beauty store in 1999, Olive Young has become the Global beauty & health trend leading retailer. By seamlessly integrating offline and online environments, the company has defined the omnichannel experience for Korean Beauty, a phenomenon also known as K-beauty. As the brand expands into international markets — including a high-profile move into the U.S. — the company faced a pivotal milestone: establishing a Global Standard Infrastructure Architecture.

Led by Olive Young’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team, this initiative prioritizes infrastructure automation and retail-tech advancement to guarantee 100% availability and high Quality of Service (QoS) during periods of rapid scaling and traffic volatility.

“The mission of the Olive Young SRE team is to design a non-disruptive and highly scalable infrastructure so that domestic and international customers can enjoy a seamless shopping experience without boundaries between online and offline.” - Taekeun Lee, SRE Engineer at Olive Young

The challenge: Legacy bottlenecks due to fragmented security and networking

Before partnering with Cloudflare, Olive Young managed a complex environment that struggled to keep pace with their global expansion:

• Operational Resiliency: Origin servers were often overloaded by traffic spikes during major sale events and influencer collaborations.
• Bot fatigue and data scraping: Sophisticated scrapers and credential stuffing attacks threatened business data and increased database load — driving up infrastructure costs and slowing down legitimate shoppers.
• Network rigidity: The existing “hub-and-spoke” architecture relied on hardware-heavy private lines. This made it difficult to maintain consistent performance and security when opening new locations.

During the Proof of Concept (PoC), Cloudflare’s real-time policy synchronization and low false-positive rates outperformed competitors.“In the early deployment stages, there were sections that required additional tuning. Cloudflare’s dedicated engineers quickly analyzed our operating environment, logs, and application flows to adjust rulesets specific to each service,” said Taekeun Lee, SRE Engineer at Olive Young. “Thanks to this, we were able to stabilize services in a relatively short time, which catalyzed our trust in them as a technical partner.” After the competitive evaluation, Olive Young selected Cloudflare for its ability to unify application security and networking on a single connectivity cloud platform powered by a programmable global network.

Protecting business data through intelligent bot management

Illegitimate bots pose major risks for e-commerce companies, including unauthorized data scraping and database strain. To neutralize these risks, Olive Young introduced Cloudflare Bot Management.

Unlike simple IP blocking, which often inadvertently restricts legitimate customers, Cloudflare uses machine learning to automatically distinguish human behavior from bad bots. Adopting this intelligent approach has helped Olive Young:

• Improve detection precision by 25%, ensuring a frictionless experience for real shoppers.
• Mitigation time dramatically reduced by over 80%, moving from a minute-long delay to near-real-time detection, thereby minimizing exposure and resource strain during peak attacks.
• Harden overall security by neutralizing credential stuffing attacks and protecting sensitive customer information.

As Taekeun noted, “Sophisticated scraping bots were a real business risk, causing price information leaks and database loads. However, after introducing Cloudflare, we simultaneously reduced infrastructure costs and strengthened our data security by precisely filtering out malicious bots.”

Modernizing network connectivity to accelerate global retail expansion

Olive Young recognized that its legacy “hub-and-spoke” networking approach could stifle international growth. Extending new hardware and private lines would become too costly, complex, and rigid, particularly for the multiple US locations Olive Young intends to open beginning in 2026.

To gain the agility required for a global rollout, Olive Young is transitioning to cloud-native connectivity and security with Cloudflare WAN. By the end of 2026, the company plans to route traffic globally — including headquarters and brick-and-mortar retail stores — over Cloudflare’s global network.

This initiative projects the following benefits:

• Optimized connectivity: Intelligent routing over Cloudflare’s network backbone avoids Internet congestion, ensuring high-performance worldwide, whether traffic is going between sites or cloud environments.
• Unified, simple operations: Olive Young will be able to configure and instantaneously synchronize traffic rules across every location from a single policy manager, eliminating complex hardware management.
• Consistent zero trust security: Olive Young will be able to authenticate and inspect traffic with global consistency based on zero trust principles, regardless of site location.

Altogether, this transition ensures the operational agility and technical readiness required for rapid international scaling, replacing complex, high-maintenance legacy systems with a simple, secure cloud-native backbone.

“As we scale our presence into the U.S. and beyond, we cannot allow legacy infrastructure to dictate the pace of our business,” said Taekeun Lee, SRE Engineer at Olive Young. “By moving to Cloudflare WAN, we are trading rigid physical lines for a global, cloud-native backbone that is as agile as our retail strategy. This isn’t just a networking upgrade; it’s a shift to a zero trust architecture that ensures every new store we open is high-performing, secure, and instantly connected to our global ecosystem from day one.”

What’s next: Completing a stable global omnichannel infrastructure for international expansion

Olive Young is using the launch of its first U.S. offline store (scheduled for May 2026) as a strategic pivot point for their global strategy. This is a crucial "golden time" for Olive Young to solidify its leadership position as a world-class K-beauty platform. Cloudflare is participating in this journey as a strategic partner, enabling Olive Young to make preemptive technical investments in two key areas:

• Deploying AI Crawl Control to neutralize sophisticated AI bots scraping Olive Young’s web properties, before they can impact human shoppers’ experiences.
• Leveraging Cloudflare Workers for edge computing to process data closer to the user, ensuring ultra-low latency and a seamless interface that customers expect from a global retail leader.

“Olive Young’s future lies in meeting customers worldwide beyond Korea, and Cloudflare is the most reliable partner in resolving complex global network and security issues that come with that journey. Based on the next-generation network architecture we’re building together, we will set a new standard for the global retail market,” concluded Taekeun Lee, SRE Engineer at Olive Young