In Luffy Huang’s Vision for Pulse Events, Cultures Align Through EDM Music
Stories
September 22, 2024
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CEO of Pulse Events Luffy Huang made waves across New York City this past Labor Day weekend. Known as “the world’s wettest party,” the S2O event made a splash in the Brooklyn neighborhood, delivering euphoric EDM melodies with Thai-inspired traditions that stretch across borders to America.
But as the CEO of Pulse Events, his vision yearns for unity and togetherness through the power of music. Throughout the years, Luffy has been a driving force behind the diversification of the EDM festival scene, condensing the beats into a spectacular celebration of culture and community.
The Sounds of Luffy Huang’s Chinese Upbringing and American Dream
Growing up in China, his early passion for music led him to a career as a singer and TV host between 15 to 20 years ago. Encouraged by the eclectic soundscape in the U.S., his American dream for a successful music career was granted by one of the artists he was touring along with, paving the way for his move to the States.
“I grew up in China and following my passion for music, I became a singer and TV host 15 to 20 years ago. Since it was always my dream to break into the music industry in the U.S., I began touring with artists and finally came to America with one of them in 2020.”
When he arrived in the U.S., Luffy was bewildered yet determined. The hustle in a foreign land might have caught him off guard for a moment but it also helped him head towards a new direction. “I found the industry here to be very open-minded and felt inspired and encouraged to start my own entertainment company here,” he says.
Luffy left China for the U.S., driven by the fast-paced music scene.
This geographic shift is a tableau of music inspirations, cultural shock and a deepening sense of identity, all of which prompted him to create Pulse Events, an event agency focused on bridging the Eastern and Western cultures through music and community.
Cultural Harmony Through Music and Luffy Huang’s Pulse Events Journey
“What inspired me the most was seeing people of different cultures embrace shows produced in Asia and influenced by Eastern traditions,” he says.
Such ethos were themselves echoed throughout his work, by introducing a global audience to the purpose he wanted to share more of, from highlighting notable Asian creatives and talents, to celebrating the vibrant culture of the Asian community. “I realized that this experience was missing in the U.S. and it became my mission to produce shows here that expose fans to the traditions and dance community culture in Asia,” he says. “I am proud that my shows include elements like Asian night markets, lion dances and spraying water that is the Songkran Thai New Year custom.”
One of the drawbacks of starting Pulse Events in a new country, however, is the balance and harmony among different communities, especially in the U.S. where multiculturalism has long been its celebrated trademark. Yet, despite this animated diversity, Luffy needs to traverse the tricky waters of inclusivity, representation and U.S. culture:
“Turning my vision into a reality took a bit of time. But once we put on our first Pulse Events show, we learned from the process and got into a good rhythm where we put on multiple shows annually and continued to expand. One of thechallenges I face on a daily basis is figuring out how to represent Asian culture in the most authentic way possible, while having our shows appeal to a diverse audience. Striking that balance takes a lot of thought and hard work, finding the right partners to bring that to life. Another challenge I face is that English is my second language, so I sometimes have to take the extra step of using translation tools or making a greater effort to make sure my ideas are communicated correctly.”
Luffy Huang leads Pulse Events with determination, expanding the reach of Asian culture through unforgettable shows
While those challenges might have vexed him in the beginning, every show, event and festival was an emblem of the connectivity that he always has in mind for Pulse Events. The 2023 Spring Festival that Pulse Events had orchestrated last year was an EDM-heavy event to honor Lunar New Year and pull together traditional elements, joyful moments and different communities. It was the first event to infuse electronic music and Asian culture that introduced the beauty of this cultural festival to more American youths:
“I am proud of every show Pulse Events has put on and the legacy we are slowly building by making them annual. We are gearing up for our second Winter Festival in November and our third Spring Festival next year, and planning to bring back S2O after debuting it to the U.S. this past Labor Day weekend. I feel fortunate that we have established a good working relationship with one of the most famous venues in New York City and the world, The Brooklyn Mirage. I am also proud to be the founder of the Krazy Super Concert elevating K-pop in America.”
When East Meets West in Luffy Huang’s Vision for Pulse Events
As an organization that holds the same values as AHN to uplift and highlight the Asian community, AHN takes this interview as a special opportunity to explore how Asian talents are being showcased and represented in the industry. Luffy’s vision remains unchanged:
“Themission and vision of Pulse Events is to bridge the East and the West through music events that unite people of all backgrounds and educate them. Through bringing fans of all kinds together through the common love of music, we are able to open their minds and hearts to understanding Asian culture and embracing the immense talent within our community, from music producers and DJs to entrepreneurs like myself and my colleagues.”
This determination and commitment has led Luffy on a road of success, producing annual mega shows like the Lunar New Year Spring Festival, the Winter Festival and most recently S2O New York, all to celebrate cultures and unite communities through EDM. Even just at the start, Pulse Events has landed performance deals with many prominent artists in the electronic music scene, from the enigmatic Marshmello to platinum record-selling DJ Afrojack.
Luffy’s goal is clear: bridge the East and West through music, uniting fans from all backgrounds while showcasing Asian talents.
Connect With Luffy Huang
Much of Luffy’s current success comes less from pure luck and more from a consistent performance of hard work and innovation. Whether it be electric live festivals, or getting deep down into his heritage, Luffy knows better than ever that Pulse Events was a child of hustle and resilience, no matter where you came from and who you are:
“From my own journey,I believe that if you hustle hard enough and never give up on your dreams, you will succeed, even in a foreign country or place outside of your comfort zone.”
More actors have joined the cast of Netflix’s live-action version of “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” including George Takei, Utkarsh Ambudkar from the sitcom “Ghosts,” Arden Cho from Partner Tracks, and Danny Pudi from the comedy series “Mythic Quest.”
Avatar: The Last Airbender unites the “four nations”: Water Tribe, Earth Kingdom, Fire Nation, and Air Nomads with a diverse representation of Asian and Indigenous talent.
Star Trek’s Takei voices Koh, an ancient predatory spirit. Cho, Ambudkar, and Pudi all portray Earth Kingdom characters, with Cho as June, a vicious bounty hunter; Ambudkar as King Bumi, the elderly and mercurial king of Omashu; and Pudi as the mechanist, an eccentric inventor and engineer raising his kid in a war-torn country.
Cast members include Gordon Cormier as Aang, Kiawentiio as Katara, Ian Ousley as Sokka, Dallas Liu as Zuko, Elizabeth Yu as Azula, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee as Iroh, and Daniel Dae Kim as Fire Lord Ozai.
Executive produced by showrunner Albert Kim, Rideback’s Dan Lin and Lindsey Liberatore, and Michael Goi, “Avatar: The Last Airbender” is a live-action version of the animated Nickelodeon series of the same name. Directors include Goi, co-executive producer Roseanne Liang, Jabbar Raisani, and Jet Wilkinson.
Kim tells Netflix that the live-action adaptation creates “a chance to showcase Asian and Indigenous characters as living, breathing people. Not just in a cartoon, but in a world that truly exists, very similar to the one we live in.”
Constance Wu is opening up about her time on “Fresh Off the Boat” and saying that a senior producer of the 2015–2020 ABC sitcom sexually harassed her.
She tells The New York Times about a producer’s “controlling behaviors” in her memoir Making a Scene. “Fresh Off the Boat was my first-ever TV show. I was thrown into this world,” she added, “I don’t have parents in the industry. And because I was 30, people thought I knew what I was doing. It made me paranoid and embarrassed.”
Wu also told The Atlantic she hadn’t spoken about this before out of fear of repercussions. “I kept my mouth shut for a really long time about a lot of sexual harassment and intimidation that I received the first two seasons of the show,” Wu said.
Once the show got successful after two seasons, she was able to say “no” to the producer’s harassment and intimidation. And, so she thought: ‘You know what? I handled it, nobody has to know, I don’t have to stain this Asian American producer’s reputation. I don’t have to stain the reputation of the show.”
The actress addressed the infamous tweet in spring 2019 when ABC renewed another season of the sitcom.“I was punished for being ungrateful,” she said. Wu publicly apologized, but she received backlash.
She then sought psychiatric help and quit social media for three years. Wu had started writing a book back in 2016 but had lost momentum.
In the fall of 2019, she went back to work at “Fresh Off the Boat”, the final season, where she apologized to her colleagues in person.
The next year, the world stopped due to the pandemic. And she finished the book she was writing. In her memoir, Wu talks about how she felt alone, how racism affected her career, and how she’s moving on.
“I try not to make myself out to be a hero,” Ms. Wu told NYT. “I try to make myself out to be a pretty normal person who has flaws like everybody else. I’m not really into the actor memoir where it’s like, ‘I overcame the odds, and I’m this person who was humble and just kept working. I was the victim.’ It’s less black and white than simply victim and perpetrator.”
The pandemic has devastated minority-owned businesses. Only 31% of Black-owned enterprises and 44% of Hispanic-owned businesses got Paycheck Protection Program aid, according to the Federal Reserve.
To raise awareness and support minority-owned companies across the country, major online shops and delivery systems are now showcasing Asian, Black, LGBTQ, and female entrepreneurs.
Amazon Launchpad enables vendors to identify on their “seller credentials” page if they are Black-owned, Latinx-owned, or women-owned.
DoorDash allows you to search for Black-owned restaurants in numerous US cities with “Black-owned” and “women-owned” tags on all company profiles. DoorDash Merchant Support can add the tag to a business’s profile.
Etsy lets shoppers search for Asian, AAPI, Black, handicapped, Jewish, Latinx, Native, female, LGBTQ, as well as veteran and military family-run businesses.
Google Business Profiles that are verified can add “Black-owned,” “women-led,” and “LGBTQ-owned” attributes to Google Search, Shopping, and Maps.
Macy’s Diverse Owned Brands section of its website features hundreds of items from minority-helmed brands, including those manufactured by AAPI, Blacks, Latinos and Hispanics, LGBTQ persons, and women.
The Intentionalist sorts for Asian-owned, Black-owned, Latino-owned, LGBTQ-owned, Native-owned, veteran-owned and woman-owned companies.
Uber Eats has partnered with the EatOkra app, which connects diners to Black-owned eateries, restaurants and food trucks in cities of Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami and Seattle.
Yelp allows businesses to self-identify as Black-owned. Yelp’s Ones to Watch series also spotlights top Asian-, Black-, Latinx-, LGBTQ- and women-owned businesses around the country. Businesses can also categorize themselves as “open to all,” which means that they welcome anyone regardless of race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, immigration status, religion or disability.
Two mom-friends and milk tea lovers Olivia Chen and Pauline Ang have capitalized on the early success of their milk tea company by sending samples to the head office in Costco which lead to launching their product with the retail giant in just three and a half months.
“We are still pinching ourselves that our Twrl’s Taiwan-Style Black Milk Tea is now in Southern California Costco!” Olivia says, “We’re starting with 3 locations: Irvine, Monterey Park, and Tustin (2700 Park Avenue).”
Pauline (left) and Olivia (right)
They overcame it without calling in a broker to help them. It wasn’t easy at all, however, this exemplifies the importance of hard work and perseverance of the duo to learn every step of the way for their small business to set foot in one of the world’s largest retail stores.
Olivia enthusiastically shares with Asian Hustle Network the timeline of how their plant-based Twrl Milk Tea made it into Costco to help entrepreneurs navigate the highly competitive food and beverage space.
Roadshow Or Small Rotation
We met our buyer at Expo West (Think Super Bowl for the Food & Beverage industry where retailers and manufacturers meet up. Super worth doing if you are in CPG. We even landed our 1st TV interview).
After Expo West, we sent more samples to the office and began negotiations for placement. We were offered two ways of being at Costco:
Roadshow
4 days of selling on consignment. We could control costs by using our own people and decide the volume of product we wanted to bring in.
Typically, this is how small brands enter Costco. If it does well, you are offered a rotation. If you don’t do well, then it’s really hard to get into the regular set.
Small Rotation
We started with a number of stores and the item is part of the regular set.
This is harder to secure because Costco is paying for the inventory and the buyer has to believe in your product.
In both situations, it is critical that Twrl Milk Tea sells well and ideally sells out. Why is this important?
It proves to the Costco Buyer that there is a market for our better-for-you plant-based milk teas. More importantly, companies owned by Asian American small business owners like ours are proven to be great partners worth investing time in and onboarding.
Reasons For Opting for Small Rotation
After a few weeks of due diligence on our end, we decided to go with a small rotation. Our reasons were simple:
Our manufacturer could produce the volumes needed and in the time we needed. Not always the case in this crazy supply chain. We are made in the USA so it makes a huge difference in our speed for delivery.
We could handle the financial obligations to fund the inventory. It’s a lot of money upfront so it’s not a light decision for a smaller company like ours. And, there is still a chance you can be sitting on inventory if it does not sell through.
We are committed to Costco and wanted to be part of the regular set and did not want to take the chance that with Roadshow which is only 4 days could be a bust due to so many variables that we may not be able to control.
We love Costco ourselves and shop there regularly so we saw our consumers there! Did you know the typical Costco shopper is 35-44 years old, an Asian female making $125,000 and the average trip is $114?!
Roadshow which is only 4 days could be a bust due to so many variables that we may not be able to control.
-Olivia Chen
Decisions, Decisions, Decisions
What flavor to sell?
Out of our 3 flavors, we selected Taiwan-Style Black Milk Tea to launch because it’s one of our best sellers and our Taiwan-Style Black Milk Tea flavor is really unique. Our single-origin loose-leaf black tea is a one-of-a-kind varietal, sourced from a small multi-generational family farm on a misty slope, fed by sweet mountain spring water.
Our tea flavor, aroma, and health benefits are un-parallel to anything on the market. We use pea milk and lightly sweetened our teas with organic agave so our tea flavors really come through. Only 45 calories & 6g of sugar per can.
What would the packaging look like?
Packaging design and sourcing begin for Costco. Luckily for us, Pauline Ang is a seasoned graphic design guru (with 15+ years in the food and beverage packaging for Fortune 500 companies) and designs all our packaging in-house so we could save costs and time here!
How to onboard?
Mountains of paperwork for our two-person team begin. We didn’t use a broker and did everything ourselves. Yes, a broker would have been so incredibly helpful to answer all the questions that we didn’t know the answers to and definitely would have saved us some headaches.
Big Takeaways
Don’t be afraid to chase the account you want to be in. Don’t be shy about sharing your vision of where you see the company. Special thanks to Ryan Sung of Honolulu Cookie Company and Vincent Kitirattragarn of Dang Foods for talking to us about their journey with Costco and encouraging us to go for it.
It can be done without a broker but not without headaches and some huge learning curves and we did make some mistakes along the way.
Have an advocate. We have been super lucky that our buyer has been so incredible to work with and it’s important to have such an advocate in the company. Cannot over-emphasize this enough!
Your team matters. Grateful to share this journey with Pauline Ang who is such an amazing friend and business partner. We are two moms that love Milk Tea and simply wanted to make milk tea —a quintessential Asian drink that we love—even better.
Don’t be shy about sharing your vision of where you see the company.
-Olivia chen
Connect with Olivia and Pauline
Your support would mean the world to our small business and the small family farms that use sustainable practices for a tea that’s better for you, and better for the planet. Follow our journey: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter
