Anua is #1 in America and #65 at home.

Anua has the widest distribution on our charts: 11 of 15 live channels. Read that alone and you picture a brand winning everywhere. The passport view — where it actually stands inside each shelf — says something more interesting.

Top of the chart abroad, mid-pack at home

Anua is #1 of 94 at Skin Cupid and #1 of 66 at Ulta. On the two shelves where Western K-beauty shoppers and US prestige buyers are choosing, it is the single best-selling Korean brand we can see.

At Olive Young Korea it is #65 of 100. On TikTok Shop, #80 of 100.

Same brand, same week. It is a top-2% placement on one shelf and a bottom-third placement on another.

What that pattern probably means

A brand can be built for a market it does not dominate at home. Anua's strength sits precisely where Western discovery happens — the K-beauty specialists and US prestige — while in Korea's own mass H&B ranking it competes against the full domestic field and lands mid-pack.

This is why we normalize by sample depth rather than compare raw ranks. #1 of 66 and #65 of 100 are not 64 places apart in any meaningful sense; they are a 2nd-percentile position and a 65th-percentile one.

The reading that would be wrong

Not "Anua is failing in Korea." A #65 slot in Olive Young's top 100 is still inside the top 100 of the country's largest health-and-beauty retailer — most brands never appear at all. The finding is about shape: Anua's distribution is wide, and its intensity is concentrated in Western specialist and prestige channels rather than in its home market.

What we'll watch next

The passport becomes a time series from W30. The question it will answer: when a brand's home-market rank moves, does its US position follow — and with what lag? That lag, if it exists, is the single most useful number this archive can produce.