The first time John Kang remembers seeing a Korean bath mitt, he was four years old in a public bathhouse in South Korea. It was red with three black stripes. The kind of scrubby that's been in those rooms, more or less unchanged, for the better part of a century. He didn't know it then, but he'd spend the next six decades quietly circling back to that memory.
In the meantime, he’d quit law, sell loofahs to Bed Bath & Beyond on a handshake, accidentally launch the first foot lotion in the U.S. market, and build one of the longest-running independent wellness brands in the country. The Korean spa line that’s launching in 2027 is, in a sense, where the whole thing was always headed.
He just didn't know it.
The accident
If you've read the Columbia alumni profile, you already know the broad strokes. Kang got two degrees from Columbia, worked as an attorney for a few years, and quit to sell loofah sponges. What the official version skips is just how seat-of-the-pants the whole thing was.
His parents had an importing business. Among the inventory was loofahs. In 1993, a small chain called Bed Bath & Beyond, then about five stores, was looking for a line of bath accessories. Back then, their HQ operated out of a second-floor office in Huntington, Long Island. Serendipitously, Kang had heard about their search from his father's sales rep. He showed up.
"I took one of the loofah sponges and I literally did something on a word processor, and I had an artist draw up the Earth Therapeutics logo. And I xeroxed off a bunch of labels. I pasted it on the loofah sponge and I showed it."
They bought it with a first order of $8,000. Not too shabby!
That same year, Bed Bath & Beyond expanded to thirty stores. The following year, they went public. "The stars were aligned," Kang says, in the way founders say things in retrospect that they couldn't possibly have known in the moment. Linens 'n Things came knocking. So did a little startup called Ulta. The first year, Earth Therapeutics did almost a million dollars. All with the humble loofah.
"It's not rocket science," he says. "It's esoteric stuff, loofahs. I was like, who the hell wants to get into that business?"
The answer, it turned out, was him.
The pattern
A few years in, Kang launched what he believes was the first foot lotion in the U.S. market. I asked him if he was making some grand bet on the future of foot care.
"Angela, to be honest, I was basically just looking for niche items," he says and laughs. "I couldn't just come out with a body lotion because everybody and their mother had a body lotion. So I was looking for areas where I could be competitive. I wish I could say I was obsessed with foot health and all that. It wasn't like that. I was looking more for a market opportunity."
He didn't know foot lotion would become the brand's signature line, just like he didn't know that a decade later, that the K-beauty sheet masks he was openly skeptical of (who the hell is going to pay five dollars for one sheet mask?) would become a cornerstone of the entire category.
If you spend enough time listening to Kang, you start to notice that he has a tendency to undersell himself. The happy accidents follow a pattern. He says some version of "I got into it at the right time" about three separate business ventures, and "nobody knows nothing," a line he picked up from Hollywood, about two more. The closest he comes to taking credit is saying that he stumbled into a retail “white space,” a phrase that turns up unprompted, as though it's the most natural way to describe the entire arc of his career.
Perhaps that is the best way to describe it: he keeps spotting rooms nobody else realized were empty. The bath accessories shelf before there was a bath accessories shelf and foot lotion before anyone knew they wanted foot lotion. K-beauty before the wave hit. Market opportunity is doing a lot of work in his story, smoothing the edges off what is, more accurately, an intuition. A nose, a knack… a specific kind of attention to the gaps.
The return
Here's where Kang gets a bit more candid.
For its first decade, Earth Therapeutics was an American brand that happened to be run by a Korean-American family. The K-beauty turn came later. When I ask him why, he doesn't reach for a strategy answer. Instead, he goes straight to childhood.
"I encountered a ton of racism growing up," he says. "It was always like c***k or j*p. And I was like, but I'm not Chinese and I'm not Japanese. And they're like, okay, so then what are you?"
For a long time, the question “what are you?” didn't have a culturally legible answer in the United States. Then K-pop happened, and Momofuko and kimchi, and K-dramas and the Oscar-winning Parasite. Then the Korean wave, hallyu, washed over everything from Sephora to your group chat. "I thought it was really cool that Korean culture was becoming, what, cool," Kang says. "That's another thing I would never have expected in a million years."
He’s not trend-chasing, per se. In fact, it's the opposite. Mass culture caught up to him, and he was fortuitously positioned to lean into his roots. Earth Therapeutics started weaving in Korean ingredients (fermented botanicals, seaweed, milkweed) and Korean accessories like sheet masks and under-eye patches and the market happily demanded it with eager, open arms.
"There's the part of every immigrant where you're looking to become more American," he says. "And then as you get older, you're sort of like, wait, but there's a part of me that is American, and there's a part of me that's Korean. And you come face-to-face with that." Earth Therapeutics, thirty years later, is what coming face-to-face looks like.
The spa line
Which brings us back to the bath house of Kang’s youth.
In early 2027, Earth Therapeutics will launch a full Korean spa line. The inspiration is exactly what you'd expect from someone who grew up inside that ritual: scrubby mitts, soaks, the kind of bath traditions that have been refined in Korea for generations. Kang is modernizing the design ("have it speak more to today's audience versus grandma") and translating those rituals for an American body-care shelf that doesn't really have anything like them yet.
His pitch for the line is, predictably, framed as a market opportunity. "When you're talking K-beauty, you're talking facial care, mostly. You're not really talking body care. So this is an opportunity where K-beauty and body care, our expertise, come together. That's white space."
The white space this time isn't only out there in the market but also from his own history. The line he's launching in 2027 is in some quiet way a practical response to a cherished memory from when he was four.
The independent
I asked Kang whether he'd ever planned to sell the business. Most founder-led brands get acquired within a decade. Earth Therapeutics is past thirty and still family owned and operated.
"They would wind up destroying the brand," he says, and his voice slightly sharpens for the first and only time in our conversation. "Private equity, let's call it what it is. It's not about preserving the soul of a business. It's about taking a business and stripping it of its parts and loading it with debt and using that money to pay themselves out."
The rest of the interview is warm, self-deprecating, full of “nobody knows nothing” and “I got lucky.” The question of independence is the place where the founder underneath all that aw-shucks shows up. He's not selling, not now, and not in the foreseeable future. The brand is his, and his family's, and it stays that way.
When I ask what the next five years look like, he laughs at the question. "It's silly. Everybody has a five-year plan. I'm not one of those people. I just try to make the best decisions I can given what today is."
On its face, it sounds like a non-answer. Sit with it for a beat or two and it lands a little differently. Three decades of loofahs and foot lotion and sheet masks and a spa line built on a sixty-year-old memory, and the man's actual operating philosophy is do today well, and let tomorrow ask the next question. Which is either the least ambitious thing a CEO has ever said, or the most. Probably a fair bit of both.
And probably why it's worked.
Earth Therapeutics' K-spa line launches in early 2027. In the meantime, shop the rest of the collection.