Amorepacific: one source of truth for five brands in China.
In 2021 Amorepacific China wanted one place to see five brands on eleven channels against their rivals, and tools to decide where the next yuan goes. With Amorepacific's team and a development partner in Dalian, we designed the platform, supplied its social data and built its engines. It became the company's mandated source of truth, used by more than 100 people, and is under contract through 2026.
Five brands, eleven channels, one set of numbers.
In 2021 Amorepacific's China business sold on Tmall and JD, was moving onto Douyin and WeChat stores, and was talked about on seven social platforms, from Weibo and Xiaohongshu to Bilibili and Zhihu.
It wanted every brand (Sulwhasoo, Laneige, Mamonde, Innisfree, Ryo) on every channel in one place, updated daily and set against its rivals, from Estée Lauder and SK-II to Florasis and Proya. And it wanted tools to decide where the next yuan goes: which creators, which cities, which videos.
- 1
Amorepacific
Product owner. It wrote the requirements and set the priorities for every release.
- 2
A development partner in Dalian
Built the platform's front end.
- 3
unrandom
Product design, the social data from seven platforms, the scoring engines and models, and research on request.
Five years, twenty releases, one platform built together.
Amorepacific set the priorities for every release, our partner in Dalian built the screens, and we designed the product, supplied its data and built its engines. Releases shipped every month through 2021, then every two months. Each stage asked more of us than the one before.
- Early 2021
The stores and seven social platforms, on one set of definitions.
We started with Tmall and JD. With Amorepacific's product owner we designed each view, from traffic and live streaming to paid search and loyalty, and the chart components every later view would reuse, each specified with its formula and its tooltip. In June the social side went live: our pipeline captured the official accounts of the five brands and their rivals every day on Weibo, WeChat, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Kuaishou, Bilibili and Zhihu, with category keywords alongside.
- Late 2021
From what happened to what to do next.
A release a month: an executive snapshot in July; in August a "big window" mode for Double 11 and 618, with daily sales against target and a rolling leaderboard against rivals; loyalty in September; the Douyin and WeChat stores in October. In November came the first engines, and they were ours: a creator engine that scored more than 14,000 Douyin creators out of 1,000, and geo-fencing, which places every city by its sales and their growth. In September, alongside the releases, we ran the first research study: what makes a Douyin beauty video work?
- Early 2022
The research went into the product.
The study read 421,371 Douyin beauty videos, and in January it became a production checklist. Release 10 the same month gave every brand video a card with its production agency, its paid media and its results, added a content roadmap and a Douyin submission checklist, and scored cities for each brand. Release 11 in March added more than 70,000 Xiaohongshu creators to the engine and put the content findings in front of every team. Release 12 in May added paid media and creator seeding for Douyin and Xiaohongshu, CPM and CPE on every creator, and campaign management. Amorepacific's teams worked from the content analytics with their content vendors to improve content across the social platforms.
Content Studio guidelines; releases 10–12; first-hand[2][4][9]
- Late 2022–2023
Estimating what the market doesn't publish.
In September 2022 a price model, trained on 97,066 Douyin and 108,769 Xiaohongshu creators, filled the rate cards creators don't publish. By November, competitor seeding read each creator post's text and speech to find the brand it was for. By early 2023 the platform estimated competitors' spending, followed the consumer journey on Douyin and Tmall (5A and AIPL), clustered each city's orders and sorted customers into zones. In September 2023 a rent model across 506,000 properties filled the gaps in an estimate of disposable income.
Price prediction; competitor seeding logic; rent prediction; release records[5][6][7][9]
- 2024
A new system, commissioned.
Three years after the first video study, Amorepacific commissioned a system to score its ad videos on Qianchuan, Douyin's ad platform, and we built it end to end. It splits each video into scenes and reads what is on screen: objects, text and its fonts, speech, music and sound effects, loudness, light, and which creator appears. It then scores the video and takes points off for what breaks the brand's rules, such as a font it doesn't allow or a banned soundtrack. The team sets the penalties itself.
Qianchuan Scoring System manual[8]
- 2025–2026
Still the source of truth.
At its peak more than 100 people at Amorepacific China worked from the platform, mandated from the top as the company's source of truth. Five years on it is still in use, under contract through 2026.
First-hand[9]
The market shrank, and Amorepacific restructured.
−4.5% · −1.1%
in 2022 and 2024. In between, 2023 grew 5.1%, the lowest positive growth in a decade.[10][11][12]
−26.7%
to ₩510.0bn, on "downsizing inventory in major e-commerce channels, and optimizing offline stores"[13]
Back in profit
on revenue up 0.5%: "operating profit turned positive with operational efficiency"[14]
Amorepacific's own published figures, and China's National Bureau of Statistics'. Amorepacific credits its 2025 result to its own restructuring. A dashboard does not grow a market; we show this as the record, not as our result.
What we built for Amorepacific grew into unrandom.
The creator engine became the unrandom Score. The price and cost work became Paid CPM and CPE, the beauty codebook became Labels, and the visual types became Visual Narrative. The Qianchuan system's processing (scenes, on-screen text, speech, music) became the Deep Dive behind every post we read, now across Douyin, Xiaohongshu, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and X.
How it works →- Creator engine score, five parts to 1,000
- unrandom Score
- Creator CPM, CPE and the price model
- Paid CPM and CPE
- The beauty codebook
- Labels
- Visual types from 421,371 videos
- Visual Narrative
- Qianchuan scoring: scenes, text, speech, music
- Deep Dive
- Daily tracking against a rival set
- Tracking and Compare
- 1unrandom, Amorepacific off-platform data pipeline: design document v1.4, May 2021.
- 2unrandom, Amorepacific China dashboard: product design document v1.9, December 2021, and releases 10–12, January–May 2022.
- 3unrandom, Douyin Content Studio analytics (test run), September 2021. Public Douyin data.
- 4unrandom, Content Studio guidelines, December iteration, January 2022.
- 5unrandom, Douyin and Xiaohongshu creator price prediction, September 2022.
- 6unrandom, competitor social seeding logic, November 2022.
- 7unrandom, data enrichment: missing rent prediction, September 2023.
- 8unrandom, Qianchuan Scoring System technical manual v1.0, July 2024.
- 9unrandom, engagement records for Amorepacific China, 2021–2026.
- 10ChemLinked, Monthly Digest: China Cosmetic Sector Review, January 2023 (National Bureau of Statistics figures), 10 February 2023. cosmetic.chemlinked.com
- 11Jing Daily, Modest Growth of Over 5 Percent in China's Cosmetic Retail Sales (National Bureau of Statistics figures), 18 January 2024. jingdaily.com
- 12ChemLinked, A Look Back at 2024: China's Beauty Market Landscape (National Bureau of Statistics figures), 26 February 2025. cosmetic.chemlinked.com
- 13Amorepacific, 2024 earnings release, 6 February 2025. apgroup.com
- 14Amorepacific Holdings, 2025 earnings release, 6 February 2026. apgroup.com