With the upcoming holidays fast approaching, shoppers in need of gifts who also want to support LGBTQ businesses can utilize the online marketplace at the website Famm. Its owners have curated a list of nearly 400 LGBTQ-owned companies from across the U.S. and internationally.
Among those featured are several food and beverage brands based in the Bay Area, such as Sincere Cider, Equator Coffees, Cowgirl Creamery, Kokak Chocolates, and The Chaga Company. As for queer-owned home goods purveyors, there are candle company Matthew Dean Stewart from Brooklyn, New York, and Humboldt House that features items from Chicago-based makers and artisans.
Then there is the online gift boutique Fruitloots based in West Hollywood, California. The queer-owned company curates gift boxes filled with goods made by LGBTQ+ and people of color producers. Not only does Famm provide links to the websites of the different brands it highlights, it also posts to the blog section of its own website interviews with various company founders.
"With us, we really felt it was important to be more intentional in where we are spending our dollars, and we wanted to spend our dollars with the queer community," said Famm co-owner Cat Perez.
Another "big part," noted Perez, was sharing the stories of the LGBTQ business owners. The write-ups offer visitors to Famm a way to better familiarize themselves with the LGBTQ entrepreneurs.
They were sparked by Marianna Di Regolo, Famm's other co-owner who is also married to Perez, often doing her own online searching to learn more about the brains behind a business.
"It is an opportunity to share more info about them," explained Di Regolo to the Bay Area Reporter in a joint interview with her wife to discuss their own backstories and business plans for Famm.
They include the planned launch later this year of the Famm Connect app, intended as a business-to-business match-making service for LGBTQ entrepreneurs. It is an extension to the list of LGBTQ+ service providers that can already be found on the Famm website.
Nearing 100 featured under the website's "services" page, the LGBTQ providers run the gamut from offering financial services and interior decorating to home organizing and family building.
Eying to go live with the app in October or November, the couple is already compiling an early access sign up list for LGBTQ-plus identified professionals who want to use it.
"Really what it is — I don't like using this but it is essentially what it is — is the queer LinkedIn so to speak," said Perez. "It is where LGBTQ-plus professionals or business owners sign up and connect with each other in a more intentional way. It was born out of the conversations and connections we have made meeting these entrepreneurs and professionals while building Famm."
Founders have Bay Area roots
The queer couple, who have a 3-year-old son, Nico, whom Perez gave birth to, is trying to have a second child, whom Di Regolo will give birth to hopefully next year. They recently moved out of downtown Sacramento into a larger home in Gold River in anticipation of growing their family.
Perez, 43, who is Puerto Rican and Korean, grew up in New Jersey and moved to San Francisco nearly 20 years ago after graduating from Adelphi University on Long Island with a B.A. in art. One of her first jobs was with Williams Sonoma as a brand packaging designer.
Di Regolo, 37, who also identifies as pansexual, is Iraqi and Irish and was born in Orange County and grew up in Sacramento. After enrolling in San Diego State University and finding the LGBTQ community there wanting, she transferred to San Francisco State University, graduating in 2009 with a B.S. in business administration and marketing.
Fifteen years ago, the women had first met at the now-closed lesbian bar The Lexington Club that had been on a side street in the Mission district. Di Regolo had dated a friend of Perez's and they often ended up at the same events.
By 2017, they were both working for the technology platform HealthSherpa, which Perez co-founded. Two years later Di Regolo left her job with the health care company and began dating Perez.
In 2021, the couple married and, in 2023, they quit their corporate jobs to focus full time on building out Famm.
The business name is a nod to LGBTQ people forming chosen families due to being estranged from their birth families. The couple has created their own queer family with the people they have befriended in the Sacramento region.
"Just having that family, that queer family, is really, really important to us. We wanted to build that in our business," said Di Regolo.
She was adopted into an Italian and Lithuanian family who five years earlier had adopted her brother. Their father grew up in San Francisco and had family in the East Bay.
At age 19, Di Regolo met her birth mother who now lives in Texas and has four sons with her husband. She has never met her birth father, who met her birth mother in Europe and followed her back to Southern California, where she grew up and he now lives in San Diego.
Perez recalled having a "pretty messy" coming out process with her religious family — her dad was raised Catholic, while her mom began taking her and her siblings to a Korean church — and not speaking to her parents for a time. (They are now the closest they've ever been, she said.)
"Getting older as queer folks, finding community or re-finding that was important to us," said Perez.
Those familial relationships and experiences led them to feel Famm was a perfect name for their business venture.
"We want to build support for each other within this idea," said Perez of the couple's goal with Famm. "We want to build a foundation here for queer folks and LGBTQ-plus folks to create their own table, and not just have a seat at the table, to build up wealth and a legacy."
As for how they earn an income via Famm, the couple charges a fee — $15 per month or $150 per year — to the LGBTQ service providers who want to have a page featuring them on the Famm website. (The brands selling products do not pay a similar fee.)
"These pages are much, much more robust than the brands pages," said Di Regolo, adding they also offer quarterly virtual meetups for the service providers to connect. "It has been really fun and really rewarding. A lot of service providers have been connecting afterwards, becoming friends or partnering and buying from each other. That has been really cool."
Their aim is to sign up at least 100 service providers by the end of the year. When the Famm Connect app goes live, it will be free to use at first. But the couple is looking to monetize it in 2025, with a goal of bringing in upward of 25,000 users after the first six months of operation.
As for the brands they feature, they do not earn a commission or share in the proceeds from sales made by customers who find them via their Famm listing. The couple will reach out to business owners about adding them to the website and welcomes companies to reach out to them about being included.
"Any e-commerce brand selling a product interested in being listed, or a service provider who is interested in getting their own page on Famm, they can literally go to our website and click the 'get listed' button," noted Perez.
Famm was born from the couple hunting online for LGBTQ-owned companies to support and wanting to make finding such businesses easier for everyone.
"We wanted to see it in the world and use it ourselves," said Perez.
One idea they have tossed around is to host summits or more regional in-person events for the business owners listed on Famm to meet each other as well as Perez and Di Regolo, who have connected with most of them only virtually. As for opening their own Famm brick-and-mortar shop stocked with goods made by the LGBTQ makers, the couple hasn't made it a part of their business plan.
"That is an amazing idea," said Di Regolo, "and would be so cool. But it isn't something we pictured."
UPDATED 9/18/2024 to correct where Marianna Di Regolo was born and year she graduated college, as well as to clarify they also feature international LGBTQ brands and aim to have 25K users of their app within six months of its launch.
Got a tip on LGBTQ business news? Call Matthew S. Bajko at (415) 829-8836 or email [email protected]
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