What AAPI Heritage Month Actually Reveals About a Brand

Written By Chloe Cai

In May, major brands find a reason to participate in Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. A caption about community, a product with 'Asian-inspired' in the description, maybe a giveaway. By June, all traces of it had vanished. In fact, the brands that performed well this month were not necessarily those with the most exquisite content. Instead, cultural identity has become part of the way they operate, influencing their products and teams.

At SOA, we track brands' performance during cultural moments, as strategies usually emerge before the start of the month.

The brands that showed up were already there

Glow Recipe

The clearest signal of whether a brand belongs in this conversation isn't what they posted on May 1st. It's what they were doing in February. Glow Recipe’s co-founders, Sarah Lee and Christine Chang, hosted their 2026 Glow Global Conference in February. They launched a live event where they revealed new products, took audience votes on upcoming launches, and, as they put it, "celebrated our Korean heritage and skincare philosophies." That post went up 12 weeks before AAPI Heritage Month. It had nothing to do with a calendar reminder. By the time May arrived, Glow Recipe didn't need a heritage month campaign. Their Korean identity was already embedded in how they run their business, how they talk to their community, and how they develop their products, fruit-forward formulas rooted in K-beauty philosophy, translated into a visual language that any Sephora shopper could recognize. The cultural origin isn't decorative. It's structural. This is what separates a brand that belongs in the AAPI Heritage Month conversation from one that showed up for it. Glow Recipe didn't show up in May. They were already there.

Make the table bigger

Tower 28

Tower 28's AAPI Heritage Month post didn't feature their own products. It featured other AAPI-founded brands across beauty, home, food, and media. "In your vanity" highlighted Patrick Ta Beauty and Cocokind. "In your home" featured Fly By Jing, T3 Micro, Nami Matcha. "In your headphones" recommended podcasts like Tiger Sisters and Vivian Tu's Networth and Chill, and Joji's music. The post closed with: "Tag your favorite AAPI-founded brand below."
That post earned 1.5K likes. Nothing was for sale. The strategic move here goes beyond a beauty brand shoutout. By spanning categories, skincare, food, podcasts, music. Tower 28 reframed what AAPI Heritage Month support looks like. It's not just "buy from us." It's: here is how AAPI culture already lives in your daily life, in every room, in every routine. The carousel turned a brand post into a cultural guide. Amy Liu's letter came first, not a brand caption, a founder writing in first person about why she built Tower 28. The cross-category shoutouts meant every tagged brand's audience had a reason to see the post, without a dollar spent on distribution. And asking people to tag their own favorites in the comments meant the community kept adding to the list long after Tower 28 hit publish. They asked one question. Their audience did the rest. Community leadership is not established by talking about your own sense of belonging. It was built by making room for others, and Tower 28 made room for the entire lifestyle.

The founder is the brand. The brand is the founder

KraveBeauty’s post for AAPI Heritage Month didn't feature a product. Instead, it featured a photo of the team, which, as the caption explained, had been posted without the founder's knowledge.
“we didn't tell our founder we'd post this 🥹 happy AAPI month @liahyoo the woman who built something we're so proud to be a part of 💚 this one's from all of us at team KB."

Krave Beauty

The strategy combines employer branding with cultural authenticity. By making the founder the subject, KraveBeauty transformed an internal cultural moment into public-facing brand content at no production cost. The "we didn't tell her" framing was the key creative decision: it made a planned post feel unplanned, which is exactly the kind of content that performs organically. Audiences don't share brand announcements. They share things that feel human. The result is a post that does three things at once: celebrates AAPI Heritage Month, demonstrates that the brand's cultural identity runs deeper than a caption, and signals to potential customers and future employees what KraveBeauty actually values. The founder's identity isn't the campaign. It's the proof that the campaign needed.

The product already had the story

Patrick Ta Beauty

Patrick Ta Beauty posted a single image: the Milk Tea lip balm against a glass of boba. One product. One cultural reference. No campaign. The strategy is cultural occasion marketing anchored in product heritage. Milk tea isn't just a flavor choice, it's one of the most iconic drinks in Vietnamese culture, deeply embedded in daily life and youth identity in Vietnam. For Patrick Ta, a first-generation Vietnamese American, connecting his lip balm to that cultural reference isn't a marketing stretch. It's a direct line from his background to his product. AAPI Heritage Month gave him the occasion to make that connection explicit. What makes this work strategically is that the product did the heavy lifting before May arrived. Patrick Ta didn't need to manufacture a story in May, he just needed to surface one that already existed. The boba visual made it immediately recognizable to his AAPI audience, while staying accessible enough for everyone else. One post, one image, one sentence. The cultural resonance was already baked in.

The coalition play: when "together" has to mean something

Three AAPI-founded food brands: Bachan's Japanese BBQ Sauce, Laoban's dumplings, and YUZUCO ran a joint giveaway for Heritage Month. The prize was a curated package of all three brands' products. To enter: follow all three, like the post, and tag a friend.

Bachan's Japanese BBQ Sauce, Laoban's dumplings, and YUZUCO

The strategy is nostalgia marketing through brand coalition. The campaign line said it directly: "bring your favorite flavors home." These aren't three brands that happened to share a demographic. They're three brands whose products together reconstruct a sensory memory, the kind of food that tastes like home for AAPI communities across the country. Bachan's Japanese BBQ sauce, Laoban's dumplings, YUZUCO's yuzu-ade: separately they're products, together they're a meal that means something. Asian Pacific American Heritage Month provides the cultural context that gives this alliance meaning. Without it, three unrelated food brands running a joint giveaway feels arbitrary. With it, the shared Asian identity becomes the reason for the partnership, and 'flavors from home' becomes a message that lands emotionally, not just commercially. The follow-all-three mechanic converted that emotional resonance into measurable audience growth for each brand. Culture was the hook. Reach was the outcome.

What this means for your brand

The brands featured in this piece employed various tactics, including a founder's letter, cross-category shout-outs, surprise team tributes, products with stories, and coalition giveaways. But the strategy underneath was the same in every case. They didn't draw on their cultural identity in May. They had been building on it all year.

Glow Recipe's Korean heritage lives in their formulations. Patrick Ta's Vietnamese background is in the product itself. KraveBeauty's internal culture reflects its founder's identity. Tower 28 made room for others because amplifying AAPI voices was the reason Amy Liu built the brand in the first place. Bachan's, Laoban, and YUZUCO found each other because they share the same pantry.

We work with brands to find what's already true and build a strategy around it. If you're thinking about how your brand shows up at cultural moments, we'd love to talk.

Sources

Chloe Cai
Next

What April Fools' Actually Reveals About a Brand