Joshua K. Lau and the long way to the shop next door

The shop in Milpitas has pastel colors, makeup stations and products from more than 60 Asian brands. It occupies 1,500 square feet in the Great Mall, a thoroughly physical destination for a business that learned its trade on the internet. For Joshua K. Lau, its opening in 2026 carried another meaning. His company had begun in the San Francisco Bay Area. After nearly three decades of sending Asian products across borders, he was opening a door close to where he had started.

That makes a pleasing circle, although circles conceal the amount of walking involved. His story takes in an economics degree, an analyst’s desk, an online CD business, a fashion launch, warehouses, wholesale customers and a Hong Kong stock-market listing. The merchandise changed. The practical question running through Lau’s career remained recognizable: how does someone get hold of a product that happens to be far away?

A basement with an overseas address

Lau and his wife, Priscilla Chu, began the business behind YesStyle in a San Francisco basement. The group’s formal beginning was December 1997, when they founded Asia CD, Inc. in California. Its first website, AsiaCD.com, went live in April 1998. Those two dates describe different moments: putting the company together, then opening its digital doors. Even an internet shop needs a little time to get the shelves ready.

The initial purpose was specific: make Asian entertainment products accessible to customers in the United States. Music and other entertainment gave the business an identifiable audience and a reason to exist. An online catalogue could connect an overseas customer with something that a nearby shop might not carry. The basement was local; the transaction already had an international character.

The name expanded before the product range did. In 2000, Asia CD became YesAsia, and the website changed with it. Funding rounds followed the early development: Series A in 1999, Series B in 2000 and Series C in 2006. Read together, those milestones show years spent building an operating business before YesStyle appeared. The fashion site arrived after an apprenticeship in selling other things.

The analyst and the operator

Lau graduated from Stanford in June 1996 with a bachelor’s degree in economics, awarded with distinction. From July that year to July 1998, he worked as an analyst in Goldman Sachs’ Consumer Investment Management Division. The dates overlap with the company’s founding. His move into commerce belongs to the late 1990s, when the first website was being prepared and an established professional career was still part of his working life.

Chu brought a different background. She had worked as a programmer analyst in California and earned an MBA in 1997. Today she chairs YesAsia Holdings and serves as vice president of operations. Lau is CEO and an executive director. Their responsibilities give the partnership a visible division of labor: overall strategy and management on one side, daily administration, logistics and customer service on the other.

There is a family connection elsewhere in the leadership team, too. Chu’s brother, Chu Kin Hang, joined in 1998 and later became vice president of content. Such continuity gives Lau’s story an ensemble cast. A founder biography can easily reduce a company to one person with a good idea. Here, the documented careers keep putting other people back in the picture.

The clothes in the browser

The observation behind YesStyle was domestic. In 2006, Lau noticed Chu buying clothes online. They already understood how to run an e-commerce operation. Fashion offered another application for that experience, and YesStyle launched that July. It is an origin with the useful quality of sounding like something that might actually happen in a household.

Asked in 2014 what kept him building, Lau offered a plain answer:

“I love to see our ideas realized.”

Joshua K. Lau, 2014

He also described the tension between competitive prices and product quality, and an ambition to make Asian fashion accessible without a trip abroad. Away from work, his stated pleasures were soccer, badminton and hiking with his son. The portrait is of someone interested in making things work, with a preference for activities that occasionally require leaving the screen behind.

A much earlier glimpse of his retail thinking comes from 2003, when YesAsia planned to expand its online bookstore into Singapore, Taiwan and mainland China. Lau emphasized service, including telling people whether books were available and how long an unavailable title would take. That sounds almost comically modest beside the vocabulary of modern online retail. It also sounds like exactly what a person waiting for a book would want to know.

The detail matters because it gives the later expansion a recognizable ancestor. Before the cosmetics, the creator programs and the showrooms, there was an argument about keeping the customer informed. Geography was one obstacle. Uncertainty was another. A shop could work on both.

The unglamorous art of arriving

Cross-border commerce makes a seductive promise on the screen. The less photogenic work begins when someone tries to pay. YesAsia began working with PayPal in 2000, using a payments platform that could help it serve customers across currencies and borders. Overseas buyers needed confidence in a merchant they might never encounter anywhere except a browser.

By 2023, the company’s response to changing shopping habits included autonomous mobile robots, smart warehousing, customer-service chatbots and data tools. Faster delivery expectations had made the machinery behind the website increasingly consequential. There is little glamour in the route a parcel takes through a warehouse. There is plenty of disappointment when the parcel fails to turn up.

Language presented another practical boundary. A 2011 account of YesAsia described adapting languages, content, design and product offerings for different audiences. That same account put its sites at 2.4 million unique users a month. The scale belongs to that period; the operating problem travels well. A customer should be able to understand what is being offered before being asked to trust the checkout.

The milestones became more varied: a YesStyle app in 2014, a creator initiative in 2018, and an influencer program in 2019. Each added another way for a customer to encounter the business. None removed the original obligation to complete the order. Lau’s expanding storefront still depended on the less entertaining business of fulfillment.

A second customer enters the shop

AsianBeautyWholesale.com launched in August 2017. The name is obligingly literal: this was a route to business customers buying Asian beauty products. Alongside YesStyle’s individual shoppers, the group could serve retailers seeking stock for their own customers. The shopping basket had acquired a commercial cousin.

YesAsia Holdings listed on Hong Kong’s Main Board on 9 July 2021, under stock code 2209. Lau had received an Asia Pacific Entrepreneurship Award in the e-commerce category four years earlier. The award recognized an individual; the listing introduced a recurring public accounting of the company he and Chu had built.

For 2025, the group reported revenue of US$501.54 million. YesStyle contributed US$347.48 million, while AsianBeautyWholesale generated US$148.89 million. Those are company sales, rather than a measure of Lau’s personal wealth. They describe how far the commercial activity had moved from the original entertainment catalogue, and how much of it now involved selling to other businesses.

Lau’s stated direction in March 2026 was to deepen engagement beyond the group’s established US, UK, Canadian and Australian markets, while connecting beauty brands with international retailers. That ambition brings him back to the old access question. The buyer might be an individual browsing at home or a retailer placing a larger order. Each needs a workable route to the product.

A shop with a return address

On 23 October 2025, Lau and Chu helped inaugurate Yesful Land in Seoul’s Seongsu district. The showroom and community hub brought together creators and brand partners. Its opening included more than 50 international content creators and 120 business partners from 45 Korean beauty brands. An online retailer was giving its relationships a physical meeting place.

The space included photo installations, workshops and a café. Lau spoke about connecting people with the community behind the products. There is a practical logic to that setting: people who usually encounter one another through a screen can gather around the same table. A café is also a reasonably civil way of acknowledging that business relationships sometimes improve with a drink.

The Milpitas store followed in 2026. Here the emphasis was on trying products, with makeup stations and a range customers could explore in person. Lau described the Bay Area opening as a homecoming. The geography supplied the sentiment; the shelves supplied a new way to shop.

The latest half-year figures, for the six months ended June 2026, put group revenue at US$301.51 million and net profit at US$18.30 million. Growth came with the continuing work of logistics, international markets and connecting online attention to physical experiences. Nearly three decades after the founding, the business was still being adjusted around how people discover and buy.

For Lau, the route has led from an analyst’s desk and a basement to CDs to clothing and beauty, and eventually back to a Bay Area storefront. The last step has an appealing simplicity. Someone can walk in, look around and leave with a purchase. After all those years making distance manageable, he has given some customers a chance to dispense with the distance altogether.