As Black Friday nudges consumers toward the trenches of Amazon, Here & Always stands in warm contrast – a slow, intentional marketplace built from heritage and heart. Founded by Zion Liu and Christian Leon, two queer, first-gen creators who couldn’t find a place that reflected their own identities or the makers that they admire, the brand was birthed from a simple desire: to gift beautifully wrapped, meaningful objects made by real hands and rooted in real stories. What began Liu and Leon’s love of gifting and design quickly evolved into a purpose-driven platform that uplifts queer, immigrant, independent, and allied artisans while reimagining what modern, values-led commerce looks like.
What ignited your inspiration to start an artisan marketplace, and when did you first realize it could grow into a business?
We built Here & Always because we could not find a place where we could gift beautifully wrapped, intentional pieces made by hands and hearts that reflected our own. Queer, first-gen, immigrant, independent, and allied makers all in one place, in one easy experience. So we set out to build it.
The funny part is that it did not start as “let’s build a marketplace.” Zion has always dreamed of a Candy Spelling–level gift-wrapping room, and I am the person who goes way too hard for holidays and gifting. We are both obsessed with home, renovation, and timeless design, so we knew whatever we did together would live in that world of objects and beauty.
Last year we left corporate life to build something with purpose. The first idea was simple: wrapping paper and packaging that reflected the diaspora of LGBTQ+ life, chosen family, and our family roots. The plan was to sell on an existing marketplace and keep it moving.
Then we saw how those platforms actually work, how they profit even when small brands do not, and how quickly major retailers were rolling back DEI and treating “support” as seasonal marketing. That was the turning point. Here & Always stopped being a single product and became a home: a marketplace built by us, for us, where value flows back to makers and the communities they come from, and where the person behind the work is never erased. That is when we knew it could and should be a real business.
Eighty percent of your founding brands are LGBTQ+-owned. Why was queer representation essential to the DNA of Here & Always?
Queer representation is essential because it is our reality. We are queer, and the people who shaped our taste, our sense of home, and our idea of beauty have always been queer, too. For decades, queer makers have set the tone for culture, but they are rarely the ones who benefit when their ideas go mainstream.
At Here & Always, that had to change. Most of our founding brands are LGBTQ+-owned, and alongside them are our allies from immigrant, Black, Brown, and Asian communities who share these same values. Representation is not a seasonal campaign for us; it is the foundation of our marketplace. Diversity is not the side story; it is the core. Structuring the business this way lets us redirect money, visibility, and long-term opportunity back to the communities that have always been quietly leading the way.
Your brand is rooted in heritage, queerness, and community. How have your personal identities influenced the aesthetic or themes of your brand?
Our aesthetic really started at home. Long before Here & Always, we were renovating and restoring homes after we’d worked our day jobs. Our last project before this brand came to life was a midcentury house we restored stud by stud, doing a lot of the work ourselves. We’ve also never been fast-commerce consumers; we would rather save for one beautiful object than buy five disposable ones. Everything we brought home had to feel timeless, well-made, and built to last for years. That lens is baked into the brand.
Layered on top of that is who we are: queer, children of immigrants, raised in Los Angeles. We grew up around altars, candles, plastic-covered sofas, crowded tables, and objects that carried huge emotional weight. Those memories show up in Here & Always as “everyday luxuries” that feel a little sacred: candles, matchboxes, keepsakes, and home pieces that are meant to anchor a space, not just decorate it. The result is an aesthetic that feels like a lived-in shrine, clean and design-forward, but full of story, heritage, and a sense of community you can actually feel when you hold the objects.
Let’s talk challenges. What are some of the biggest obstacles you’ve faced as a small business owner, and how did you come out the other side?
Taste vs Values. We refused to choose between design and thoughtful sourcing. That meant more research, more conversations with artisans, and saying “not yet” to products that were almost right.
Craft vs Margin. Reusable keepsake packaging, recycled materials, and small-batch production don’t automatically play nice with startup math. We quickly learned to redesign, simplify where needed, and remove anything that didn’t add meaning along the way.
Infrastructure vs Story. We’re a marketplace, not a single-SKU brand. That meant building all the tech/ops (Shopify stack, fulfillment logic, product data, reviews) while writing a story that could hold many voices and still sound uniquely like us.
If you could collaborate with any artist, company, or creative, who would it be and why?
Because Here & Always is built around multiple brands, it never feels quite right to single out a “dream” collaborator without making others feel lesser by omission. In many ways, we are already collaborating with our dream partners: the artisans and studios who trusted us early and whose work shapes the soul of the marketplace.
More broadly, our ideal collaborators are people and institutions who treat objects as portals, not just products, and anyone who cares as much about story and community impact as they do about design. If a collaboration helps us pour more resources back into makers and the communities we love, then that is the kind of “dream project” we are excited to say yes to.
How has the cultural and political climate around queer and immigrant communities shaped your mission?
Being queer-founded and LA-based is our foundation. Our identities and origins inform everything we do. We have learned that visibility matters, that luxury does not have to exclude queer, BIPOC, immigrant, or allied communities, and that home can be a sanctuary of authenticity instead of a place where you shrink yourself.
Los Angeles is a city of reinvention and layers. It reminds us daily that culture is not homogeneous, that style and substance can coexist. Against a backdrop where social and political pressure on marginalized identities is very real, we are not interested in building only as a reaction to harm. We are building for what is possible: a marketplace where queerness or diversity is not a search filter but part of the fabric, where the makers we uplift reflect a wide spectrum of identities and experiences, and where “good taste” is not coded for a select few.
That climate also makes the work feel like a responsibility. Being rooted in LA means engaging with community, supporting local artisans while holding a global perspective, and aiming for a ripple effect—job creation, visibility, and a more inclusive idea of luxury. For us, it means every object that ships from Here & Always carries the imprint of someone who did not have to leave their identity behind to make something beautiful. That matters now more than ever.
Do you feel small businesses have a responsibility to take a stand on social issues, or is it best to stay neutral?
We do not believe there is a single rule every small business has to follow. Safety, resources, and context all matter. But we also know that for many of us, especially queer- and immigrant-founded brands, “neutrality” is not really neutral; it often defaults to the status quo.
For Here & Always, our fight is the same fight as the communities we come from, so we chose to build our values into the structure of the business instead of only into statements. We take an activism through craft approach: beauty and design come first, and then there is this “nice surprise” that your purchase is supporting small-batch artisans, queer and BIPOC makers, and giveback initiatives.
We would rather invite people in than lecture them. A lot of our customers are still learning how predatory big marketplaces and mass retail can be; we were too, until we started building our own. So our role is less about telling everyone what to think and more about creating a different model in practice, and letting people discover that they are part of something bigger than just the object in their cart.
Growing up in Los Angeles as children of immigrants is central to The Purpose Candle Collection. What childhood moment or memory most encapsulates that sentiment or experience for you?
The Purpose Collection is really three chapters from our lives and our co-creator Earthy Corazón’s life. We are all children of Latino immigrants, and you can feel that most clearly in the scent we now call Mezcal Moon. In testing, its working name was “Sunday Cooking With Family,” which is really the core memory.
For us, Sundays in Los Angeles meant gathering with the family for the carne asada. There is a fire growing in the grill, tías and tíos dropping by, cousins running through a too-small apartment or backyard, someone putting on music while the TV hums in the next room. You smell food being prepared, share old stories and make new ones.
Mezcal Moon was built to smell like that, like being held by family, by food, by memory. It is our way of bottling that specific experience of growing up as children of immigrants in LA and turning it into something you can light, wherever you are, when you need to feel that kind of home again.
What does it feel like to see customers resonate with products grounded in queer and immigrant narratives?
We are still at the very beginning, so every order feels personal. Any time someone chooses to spend their money with us, especially in a crowded market, it lands as a real act of trust.
When that choice is for a product rooted in queer and immigrant stories, it feels like a double affirmation: that our communities deserve to be centered, and that there is room in “luxury” for narratives like ours. It is validating and humbling at the same time.
We built Here & Always so people could see themselves, their families, or the people they love reflected back in what they gift and keep. To watch even the first wave of customers respond to that makes all the risk and work of starting feel worth it.
You describe your approach as “regenerative commerce.” In your experience, what does giving back more than you take look like in practice?
For us, “regenerative commerce” is a simple test we put against every decision: does this give back more than it takes, from people, from community, from culture?
In practice, that looks like a few things. On the product side, it means prioritizing small-batch, thoughtfully made objects over disposable trends, and working with artisans who are already trying to tread lighter in terms of materials and waste. On the people side, it means structuring our marketplace so makers can actually thrive, respecting their pricing, not squeezing margins to the breaking point, and centering queer, BIPOC, and our allies’ brands instead of treating them as a seasonal feature.
And on the community side, it means building giveback into the model, not just into marketing. A portion of what we do is always pointed back toward impact partners and on-the-ground work. The aspiration is that every product gives back, every purchase uplifts, and every story matters, not just in theory, but in the way money, visibility, and opportunity move through the business.
Why was it important to you that 100% of profits from The Purpose Candle Collection support community partners like Make Good, Inc.?
The Purpose Collection was born to be a proof point of that philosophy. We did not want a “greenwashing” donation model; we wanted a line where the primary job is to fund impact.
Giving 100% of profits from this collection to community partners like Make Good, Inc. was our way of saying: this is what a for-purpose business can look like. We want our entire marketplace, over time, to be using profit for good, not for greed or distant shareholders, and the Purpose Collection is the start of that, a clear line connecting beauty, story, and real-world impact.
Here & Always is described as a movement. Five years from now, what impact do you hope this movement will have on makers, customers, and culture?
We call it a movement because when you shop with Here & Always, you’re not just choosing something beautiful. You’re helping small businesses grow, redistributing economic power, and building a more equitable supply chain one gift at a time. Every product is made by real hands, real people.
Five years from now, we hope that shows up clearly. We want our communities to be thriving, hiring teams, raising their prices with confidence, and feeling supported by a marketplace that protects their value instead of eroding it. We want our customers to expect that the most beautiful objects in their homes can also be the most ethical and story-rich, and to see their purchases as a quiet way of voting for the world they want.
Culturally, the goal is for this model to feel less radical and more like the norm. If in five years it is completely unremarkable that a “luxury” marketplace is queer-founded, values-led, and transparently supporting small-batch artisans, then we will have done our job. Here & Always is our way of redefining commerce as something sustainable and regenerative, where every story and every purchase can move things a little closer to the world we want to live in.
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