The Beauty of K-Town: Besfren

Korea “Town” happens to be a narrow street on 32nd Street, stretching from 5th to 6th Avenue, and yet those two to three sidewalks are jam packed with over fifty prominent small businesses. Everything you would ever want for a night out with your friends is right on that street: restaurants, bars, bookstores, beauty stores, and karaoke bars. Madison and I frequently eat at Food Gallery 32, a crowded cafeteria-style eatery with about a dozen places right inside to enjoy Korean cooking, sweets, and drinks. K-town is divided evenly between long standing businesses and new flourishing businesses. With the rise in popularity of international beauty products and music, and the desire for immigrating Koreans to have their own enclave in the city, K-town continues to expand past Fifth and almost down to Madison Avenue.

Korea Way

Why did Madison and I choose K-town as our neighborhood of choice to explore? Well, I personally will take any excuse to go there. Both of us being open to different Asian cultures, our love for K-pop, and our love for noodles made K-town an easy choice. But K-town wasn’t nearly as easy to analyze as it was to choose. In our first excursion, we went down the street from business to business asking for managers or long standing employees for interviews, but were met with either rejection or to come another day and try again.

However, one local business we had researched beforehand was welcoming and set up a concrete interview with us. And so, we entered the world of Besfren Cafe and Beauty. Cafes and beauty stores are staples around K-town, but Besfren happens to offer the pleasant experience of convenient shopping for both tasty treats and trendy treatments. You can go into Besfren Beauty and purchase any products you desire, and then walk four steps to the door of their cafe, where you can sit, relax, and have some pastries with tea. On our first outing, we met Suzi Kim, the lively and lovely Vice Manager of Besfren, who was excited to talk to us and help us learn more about the business. When we came back, she recognized us right away and greeted us with a warm smile. Since she was scanning new shipments of merchandise, Madison and I decided to explore Besfren Beauty a bit.

Outside of Besfren Beauty

The store is white, bright, and sparkly. There are giant TV monitors on the tops of shelves playing Korean advertisements for the very skincare products they sell in the store, as well as K-pop music videos. The shelves are lined with masks, facial cleansers, exfoliators, serums, creams, lotions, and anything else you could ever imagine that could help your skin stay moisturized, bright, and clear. In the middle of the store there is a selection of makeup, as well as cute bunny-related merchandise. In fact, Suzi would later tell us that Besfren’s brand is “all about the bunny”, which is easy to tell given the two adorable bunnies on their logo.

After Suzi finished her work, she led us to the cafe one door down, which is a combination of white marble and dark latticed wood. The glass display case made my mouth water with all its different cakes, cookies, and chocolates of every size and color. We sat down together and for the next half hour, Suzi shared a glimpse into the beauty and cafe world.

Suzi Kim is in the pink shirt

The cafe portion of Besfren had been in operation since 2012, first in Flushing, and then in K-town. The beauty store, however, has only been in operation for about five months and its expansion was personally supervised by Suzi, after she had been with the company for about a year and a half.

“Seven years ago, yeah, [I moved from Korea]. I was studying art in [The] Art Institute, and then I graduated and I moved here to this company. Actually I was doing [a] part time job, but my bosses wanted [a] design for online [content]. I was working for the graphic design team, and then I was always interested in beauty, so [when] my bosses tried to open a beauty shop, I volunteered.”

In recent years, a desire for skincare products and skin health in the American public has been making businesses like Besfren compatible with different types of consumers, especially tourists and social media users. Suzi said that people love to show off facial masks on Instagram or Facebook, and the masks are widely marketable because of its easy application.

“For the facial masks, everyone can easily try it [because it comes] in small packs, and you just open it and put in on your face.”

She also shed some light on the skin care phenomenon and why Americans are interested in the Asian market.

“Usually, the American cosmetic [industry] is focused on makeup, but Korean is more focused on skincare. And right now, it’s [all about] K-pop, K-dramas, skincare. Everyone wants their skin to be clear and natural. They want to follow [Asian trends]. Yeah, maybe that’s why it’s kind of popular.”

“Right now, K-pop and K-drama is popular, so they want to try what’s Korean, [see] why they like it, they want to try it and also they are open like 24 hours (the stores in K-town), so that’s why they enjoy it.”

Surprisingly, Madison and I learned that these tourists or American consumers made up almost the majority of Besfren’s customers. We had assumed that, even with the increasing popularity of Korean products, K-town would serve as an enclave to Korean-Americans or Korean immigrants, and so everyone’s customers would mostly be Korean, or at least Asian. Suzi informed us that our idealistic vision of a Korean domain was not entirely true.

“I was expecting like Koreans or Asians, different cultures more, but this area is more tourist. So more tourists come, and less Asians.”

After Suzi’s comment, I started to wonder why this could be so, but just by looking at a map I could clearly see why this was the case. K-town is only a block from 34th Street, a huge tourist trap because of the adjacent Manhattan Mall, Empire State Building, and Madison Square Garden. It would only make sense tourists and American consumers would go explore K-town because how easily accessible it was from huge New York City landmarks.

After learning a bit about Besfren’s history and its customer demographic, we asked Suzi why she thought Besfren was special.

“I mean honestly, in K-town, there are so many cafes and beauty stores. But this is the only place that is multi-brand. So there, [the other beauty stores], have one brand but here [there are] so many brands. It also a little cheaper than others.” Perhaps since those stores have a following in Korea as well as the U.S., they can venture to have steeper prices, but Besfren is New York City based, and so to gain traction, their products are a few dollars cheaper. It’s definitely a good strategy, as Madison and I were tempted to buy something after we saw they did not cost as much as other beauty stores, but were the same skincare products.

Suzi also showed us products in both the cafe and the beauty store that were popular. First, she pointed to a “roll cake”, or cake that has its filling rolled into it. Suzi says the different fillings, such as jasmine green tea, red ginseng, or lemon chamomile “feel like ice cream”. Personally, she says, her “favorite is salted caramel. It’s really delicious!”

She also said that they received a surge of popularity from their chocolate chip cookies. Turning around, Madison and I were met with a colossal cookie bigger than our hands, with large, embedded chunks of chocolate.

It’s huge!

“We got popular because of that cookie because so many people [are] taking pictures.” She said loads of people like to upload pictures of the cookie on Instagram. “And then we came out real popular, so that’s why our company is kind of grown from last summer.”

The cafe also offers a wide selection of tea, which Suzi says is the staple drink of the shop. The owners of Besfren originally “were making ginseng [tea], so they tried to make a collaboration”, and the tea along with their different hand-crafted pastries eventually started the cafe. Drinking ginseng tea may actually have many health benefits. There are numerous reports of ginseng improving the immune system as well as lowering blood sugar levels, and Kim says this is why “so many people were interested in the tea.”

Besfren Beauty has its own creative element; it offers a selection of bunny-inspired products, including slippers, travel bottles, and pom pom bag charms. Kim confirmed that these are original Besfren goods, and the bunny, “the symbol of our company”, is at the focal point of this business. On their website, you can find the origin of this. Their logo is two bunnies on a moon pounding sweet rice with a mortar and pestle. This design is based on a Korean folktale in which these rabbits pounding rice cakes symbolize a long, happy life. And honestly, the bunny is just too cute not to use as a motif for their entire store. The animal sets the mood for the experience you have at Besfren, one that is cheerful and warm.

Besfren’s original line of products

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The Besfren logo

I couldn’t resist and bought myself two facial masks before we left. The employee who helped me went through different options with me and told me what would be best for my skin and what I was looking for, and at the register Suzi signed me up for a rewards card. I’ll definitely be back.

What does Suzi want for the future of Besfren?

“Some people noticed that [it] is much more cheaper than others, but it’s only [a] few people. So I want to let them know, in Fifth Avenue, it’s really crowded but if you cross the street [to] here, it’s less [so]. I hope to let them know, here’s one other store here. Just come!”