On the 20th November, Birdview, the company behind ‘Hwahae’ Korea’s most popular mobile cosmetics app, revealed that it had been successfully acquired by the NICE group.

Hwahae (Cosmetic Analyst) allows its users to easily recognize chemical and active constituents contained within each cosmetic product. The review of each cosmetic product is sorted by the skin type relevant to the user. Since its debut in July 2013, Hwahae has amassed more than 1.5 million members in the last two years. Averaging more than 400 thousand users per month, Hwahae is the largest mobile cosmetics app in Korea.

The app is able to provide information relating to most cosmetics available in the Korean market. The app’s database contains information for over 53 thousand products, 1.6 million types of constituents and 540 thousand product reviews.

A representative from NICE commented, “Birdview’s asset is the largest available database of cosmetics and their constituents, this surpasses a mobile platform with its substantial influence over offline commerce and commercially this has a lot of potential”. “Korean consumers are quite picky and with we are hopeful that we will be able to emulate the success we've had in Korea, overseas”.

Lee Woong from Birdview said, “The momentum created in our acquisition by NICE will accelerate growth.  We will leverage off the synergies between within the group, utilize the group’s big data centres to facilitate further develop O2O capabilities and promote growth into China and other countries”.

Birdview will continue to operate independently from NICE with the company focusing only on synergies that can be leveraged within the group.