Tinder, the world’s most popular app for meeting new people, introducesQueer Made in partnership with Little Black Book and Gaysi Family, to provide a platform for LGBTQIA+ entrepreneurs and business owners.
Queer Made, launched to celebrate Pride beyond the month gone by, is a space dedicated to celebrating, supporting, and amplifying businesses and products made, owned, and/or run by India’s LGBTQIA+ community. Tinder will match sales generated by Queer Made over a 10-week period and donate it to Born2Win, a Transgender person-led organization working toward the empowerment of members of the Transgender community through education and employment.
Tinder’s vision is to help members create meaningful connections and a place where people can be their authentic selves. Queer Made is an extension of that vision; an avenue for everyone to show their support to queer entrepreneurs from across different spectrums of gender, sexuality, age, and location, who will showcase their work and reach new and more audiences, supporting them to continue doing what they love especially during a difficult time. It features over 100+LGBTIA+ owned businesses from diverse categories across India.
Taru Kapoor, GM-India, Tinder, and Match Group on Queer Made, “At Tinder, we believe everyone deserves to feel seen, which starts with the ability to authentically be yourself. Given the pandemic and impact on our members, we wanted Queer Made to be a meaningful initiative to give queer businesses a platform and to give our broader community a way to extend their allyship. Tinder enables everyone to have access to a more diverse set of partners, companions, or life collaborators, to engage with in any way they choose, and Queer Made is a project that hopes to support that community to further representation and the belief in possibility.”
Founder of Gaysi Family, Sakshi Juneja on the partnership, “With Queer Made we hope to support and celebrate queer folx who have begun their own businesses. As passion and purpose intersect, it becomes even more critical today to share experiences of queer folx in the professional world to understand better the unique challenges they face. Whether it is financial stability, or finding life’s purpose in the work they do – there is a growing need to examine closely the varied experiences of queer folx in the professional world and especially to make their stories reach audiences whose support is imperative to equalize the playing field.”
Tinder has consistently taken strides towards creating a better experience by expanding gender identities to be more inclusive of people of marginalized genders, introducing sexual orientation so members have more say in how potential matches are ordered, and Traveller alert which appears when the app is opened in countries that have laws criminalizing LGBTQIA+ status. Tinder also runs The Museum of Queer Swipe Stories – a curated archival project that seeks to collect the many moods, experiences, and complexities of queer dating. Through Queer Made, we want to use our platform to amplify voices and let the community, and their work, speak for themselves.
