AAPI Heritage Month is a chance to celebrate the Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities that shape culture in ways both obvious and overlooked. That includes the queer founders, artists, drag performers, and entrepreneurs building brands that feel personal, specific, and very much worth knowing about.
Some of the businesses below are rooted directly in AANHPI identity; others come from Asian founders whose work has found an audience well beyond any single month of recognition. Taken together, they span coffee, skincare, home goods, makeup, apparel, and more. In other words, there are plenty of genuinely good ways to shop queer and support AANHPI creativity at the same time, year-round.
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A few of these brands are also available on LGBTQ Outpost, our new marketplace for products by and for the LGBTQ+ community, making it even easier to shop queer-owned businesses with pride and intention.
BADBUI
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BADBUI makes men’s underwear and swimwear with the kind of confidence its name promises. Founded by Jameson Bui, the New York-based brand leans into sleek, body-conscious staples like briefs, trunks, jockstraps, swim briefs, and thongs, all designed with a nightlife-aware point of view rather than a bland basics mentality. It’s underwear for people who know that “practical” and “hot” do not have to be enemies.
Blue Hummingbird Coffee
Blue Hummingbird Coffee is an Irvine, California-based roaster focused on single-origin and micro-lot coffees, with an emphasis on ethical sourcing and long-term relationships with producers. Co-founded by El Winata and business partners, the brand’s lineup stretches from Guatemalan espresso to low-caffeine blends and ceremonial matcha, giving coffee drinkers plenty to explore beyond the usual supermarket shelf.
Shop Blue Hummingbird on LGBTQ Outpost
Boy Smells
Boy Smells has grown from a living-room candle experiment by real-life partners David Kien and Matthew Herman into one of the most recognizable queer fragrance brands around. The Los Angeles-based company calls its approach “genderful,” building candles, perfumes, and home fragrance around the idea that scent should feel expansive rather than boxed into tired masculine/feminine rules. The brand has evolved over the years, but that core point of view remains the thing that made people care in the first place.
Diaspora Co.
Diaspora Co. is not simply selling spices. Founder Sana Javeri Kadri built the company to challenge a global spice trade that has long undervalued South Asian farmers and flattened regional flavor into generic pantry dust. The queer-owned brand sources single-origin spices from farms across India and Sri Lanka, pays farm partners well above commodity pricing, and treats queerness as one of its stated business values, not as a seasonal marketing garnish.
Euphoria Threads
Euphoria Threads turns queer and trans affirmation into gender-free apparel, accessories, stickers, and everyday pieces that feel made for the community rather than merely marketed at it. The brand was founded in 2023 by SJ and Misty, a queer couple; SJ has described himself as an Asian American nonbinary transmasc millennial. The result is a line rooted in joy, visibility, and the radical idea that clothes can make people feel more like themselves.
Flonatix
Flonatix is a skincare brand rooted in tropical Asia-Pacific beauty traditions, with formulas designed especially for oily, melanin-rich, and active skin. Founder Jay Hanggawan, who was born and raised in Indonesia, has written about identity, care, and the importance of not softening yourself to fit someone else’s standard. Even the packaging reflects that mission, incorporating 15 tropical Asian and Pacific Islander languages as a reminder that beauty does not have to be translated through a Western lens first.
Shop Flonatix on LGBTQ Outpost
Flower Knows
Flower Knows has become a cult-favorite C-beauty brand thanks to its ornate, fairytale-like packaging and collections that make opening a blush compact feel mildly theatrical. The company was founded in China in 2016 by Yang Zifeng and Zhou Tiancheng, better known in cosplay circles as Baozi and Hana, an out gay couple. Since then, Flower Knows has expanded far beyond its original fanbase, bringing its hyper-detailed fantasy aesthetic to beauty shoppers around the world.
KimChi Chic Beauty
KimChi Chic Beauty brings the maximalist imagination of drag superstar Kim Chi into an accessible makeup line that knows its way around both pigment and personality. Kim Chi, a Korean-American drag artist who has spoken about weaving Korean culture into her work, created the brand around the belief that makeup should be expressive, transformative, and fun rather than intimidating. The line’s bright palettes, inventive product names, and serious commitment to color payoff all feel very on-brand.
MegEmikoArt
MegEmikoArt is the work of Miko, an Asian-American trans nonbinary artist and activist whose designs center LGBTQ+ visibility, trans liberation, and community care. Their shop includes apparel, enamel pins, stickers, and fundraising projects like Trans Meals, which helps cover meals for trans people who need them. The art is often direct because the moment calls for directness, but it is also tender, celebratory, and deeply human.
Meow Meow Tweet
Meow Meow Tweet makes low-waste, vegan personal care products with a point of view that extends well beyond packaging. Co-founded by Tara Pelletier and Japanese-American Jeff Kurosaki, the brand has built a reputation around refillable and compostable options, gender-expansive beauty language, and a broader critique of who gets centered in the natural beauty space. It is the kind of personal care brand that understands a deodorant stick is not going to fix the world, but the values behind a business still matter.
Misomomo
Misomomo is a one-person art and accessories shop run by Bo, who describes the shop as “proudly queer Korean-American owned.” Named after a pet rabbit (Miso) and childhood dog (Momo), the brand sells pins, stickers, earrings, and small objects of queer cheer that feel genuinely personal rather than mass-produced into meaninglessness. The shop is sweet, expressive, and exactly the sort of small store where the care behind each order is part of the appeal.
MUD WITCH
MUD WITCH, founded by queer Japanese/Mexican artist Viviana Matsuda, makes ceramics that celebrate irregularity, softness, and form with a bit of mischief. Matsuda began working with clay after her ceramicist father died, using the practice as a way to process grief. Over time, that outlet grew into a distinctive body of mugs, bowls, planters, and sculptural pieces with curves and quirks proudly left intact. Nothing about the work feels cookie-cutter, which is precisely the point.
Smood Beauty
Smood focuses on gentle, gender-neutral skincare for sensitive and acne-prone skin. Hong Kong-born founder Andrew Lau has described the brand’s philosophy as “listen to your skin’s mood,” a useful corrective to the punishing tone that often creeps into acne marketing. Rather than treating skin like an enemy to defeat, Smood approaches it with a little more patience, a little less shame, and formulas built around calm, practical care.
Shop Smood Beauty on LGBTQ Outpost
The New Savant
The New Savant is a queer, women- and AAPI-owned fragrance studio founded by Ingrid Nilsen and Erica Anderson. The brand’s candles are built around memory, intimacy, and scent stories that do not default to the usual luxury fragrance clichés; Nilsen speaks through the brand by drawing from her lived experience as a queer, mixed-race woman.
Universal Belongings
Universal Belongings makes elevated home and tabletop goods meant to make gathering feel more intentional. The brand’s founder, born in Hong Kong and based in New York, describes the business as a merger of Eastern communal values with Western tabletop culture, resulting in tea sets, tableware, and everyday objects that feel refined but not fussy. The brand has also been identified by retail partners as being both LGBTQ+ and APPI-owned, making it a fitting addition to this list of brands worth supporting well beyond May.
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Supporting queer AAPI businesses should not be seasonal
Heritage months matter, especially when they create a reason to look more closely at people and work that are too often flattened, sidelined, or left out entirely. But the best version of this is not a one-month shopping sprint followed by 11 months of forgetting. These brands are building things with personality, craft, cultural specificity, and queer perspective. That makes them worth knowing about now, and worth coming back to later.
For readers looking for an easy place to start, LGBTQ Outpost carries several of the brands featured here, including BADBUI, Blue Hummingbird Coffee, Flonatix, and Smood Beauty. The marketplace was built to help more LGBTQ+ brands reach shoppers who actively want to support them, not only during heritage months or Pride season, but whenever they need goods for special and everyday use.
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