Vera Oh puts VOESH in 611 Target Beauty Studio doors. The brand started as Pedi in a Box.

Vera Oh used to design heavy equipment for Samsung in Seoul. Now her name sits on a Target-exclusive body-care line in 611 Beauty Studio stores. The distance between those two jobs is the whole story.

Oh is Korean-born, and she co-founded VOESH in 2013 with Joseph Choi. They made the brand name from Vera and Joseph. On September 10, 2026, their Daily Glow collection landed inside Target Beauty Studio, the retailer's new prestige beauty shop with about 90 brands and more than 1,600 products across more than 600 stores. Full-size Daily Glow pieces run about $18 to $29. There is a Vitamin C shower filter for $29 online. Oh has said in public posts that Ulta and Target were the shelves she and Choi dreamed about long after the first pedicure kit left the warehouse. The dream finally has aisle numbers.

Her early career does not read like a beauty founder origin myth. At Samsung Heavy Industries, she designed machinery and has said she was the first woman in that seat at the time. Later she worked as a principal designer at Continuum, the innovation consultancy, on projects for companies like BMW and Philips. Choi came from the electronics world too, on the procurement and operations side. They met at work, kept getting manicures and pedicures, and kept noticing the same thing: salon products scooped from open tubs felt messy to trust and messy to price.

So they built Pedi in a Box. Each step of a pedicure sits in its own sealed sachet. One client, one kit, nothing shared between appointments. Collagen gloves and socks came next. The idea was almost stubbornly practical. Nail salons across the United States are heavily immigrant-owned. Nails Magazine's 2015-16 industry numbers put Vietnamese ownership around half of U.S. salons, and much higher in California. New York's metro trade has long had a large Korean footprint too. Oh and Choi were selling into shops that already knew why hygiene and portion control mattered on a Friday afternoon rush.

The kits caught on. Company materials say Pedi in a Box passed a million units in under three years and more than 15 million by 2018. Patents followed in 2019 and 2020. VOESH now says its products are in more than 100,000 spas across 30 countries, and Oh has put the cumulative spa-treatment count above 100 million. The formulas are made in Korea. The company is American, with offices in New York and New Jersey. For a long stretch, that professional channel was the business. Salons paid the rent while the founders learned ingredients, packaging, and how to talk to distributors who had never heard of them.

Those early years were thinner than the Target launch photo suggests. In the fall of 2013, Oh has said, they had poured savings into product development, patent filings, and inventory, then watched New York cool into a slow pedicure season. Choi packed the car and drove south toward Florida, stopping at beauty-supply stores until people said yes. It is an unglamorous founding story, and that is why it lands. Plenty of diaspora households know the version where someone drives product around until a buyer blinks.

Retail came later, after the salon base was real. In March 2026, VOESH brought a Korea-made body-care line into Ulta Beauty, first online and then into more than 450 stores. Those products leaned into spa habits people could do at home: gua sha bars, massage creams, balms. Six months after that, Daily Glow at Target arrived as a separate, Target-only collection, including a probiotic complex the brand calls Baechu Biome, after napa cabbage. Oh likes to say the body deserves the same care as the face. The shelves are where that sentence gets tested.

Under the K-beauty gloss, the sequence is still pretty ordinary. She left a hard technical job. She and Choi solved a problem salons already felt. They survived a thin cash year with a road trip. They stayed in the professional channel long enough to earn Ulta, then Target. An exclusive Target line looks glamorous in a press release. It also means one big partner is carrying a lot of the bet. If Daily Glow does not reorder well, Pedi in a Box is still the floor under the brand.

Oh has spent thirteen years getting from sealed pedicure packets to a Target endcap. Anyone building a shop-adjacent brand, or still running the salon itself, can take the patience part seriously. Immigrant-Owned Small Business Financing Basics and Small Business Banking When Your Books Don't Match Mainstream Templates help keep inventory money separate from household money. Families with a shop in the name should keep Succession and Exit Planning for Immigrant-Owned Family Shops nearby. Cap what leaves the account for relatives in the Family Support Budget Calculator so a good retail season does not quietly raise every wire.

The woman who once designed machines for Samsung is now watching whether American shoppers reach for her body cream on the way to the detergent aisle. The kits that paid for the journey are still out there in salons. That is a pretty clean way to measure how she built the company.

This is educational reporting on public interviews and retail announcements, not investment, beauty, or business advice. Sales and treatment figures are brand-reported. Your facts and counsel decide any real plan.