From JPMorgan to Trader Joe’s: 2 millennials who’ve been best friends since college quit their 6-figure jobs to start a multimillion-dollar hard seltzer brand

Fortune

Lunar Hard Seltzer started as Sean Ro and Kevin Wong’s side hustle. It’s now a bestseller at Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and Target.

Transcript

00:00 (can opening)

00:01 Hi, I'm Sean Rowe.

00:03 I'm 33 years old,

00:04 and I'm the co-founder of Lunar Heart Seltzer.

00:06 Lunar is a local craft heart seltzer

00:08 made with real Asian fruits,

00:10 so that it's sweet, but not too sweet.

00:11 We have flavors like Korean plum,

00:13 yuzu, lychee, and passion fruit,

00:15 and you can find this at retailers like Whole Foods,

00:17 Trader Joe's, Target, online retailers,

00:19 99 Ranch, H Mart, throughout Massachusetts,

00:22 New Jersey, and New York.

00:23 My co-founder, Kevin Wong,

00:25 he and I first met on the first day of college,

00:27 actually, at the University of Virginia.

00:28 We were both out of state students,

00:30 and didn't have a lot of local friends.

00:31 Kevin, he started off his career

00:34 in investment banking here in New York.

00:35 For me, I took a little detour by going to grad school.

00:38 I wasn't quite ready to be an adult just yet,

00:40 so I wanted to stay in school a little bit,

00:42 and ended up going to Cardigan Mellon.

00:43 Afterwards, I came to New York,

00:44 decided to join tech startups,

00:46 and after we came to New York

00:48 and started a career in tech and finance,

00:50 we also both had the itch of wanting to be our own bosses,

00:53 and putting our own destiny in our own hands.

00:55 We knew we wanted to start some sort of a business,

00:57 and we were looking for opportunities.

00:58 And one of the areas that we always came back to

01:00 was something to do with our identities as Asian Americans.

01:03 And at this time, there was an upswell of representation

01:07 in the film, media, and arts and music space,

01:09 and we started looking around,

01:10 what are some other industries that could use

01:12 a similar level of disruption and representation?

01:15 And we were having this conversation

01:16 over a couple of drinks.

01:18 So naturally, as we were about to order our next drink,

01:20 we saw that there was a white space

01:22 between kind of the domestic beers and products and seltzers

01:26 and the imports, and that's when we knew exactly

01:28 that's where we wanted to be.

01:29 So we first came up with the idea of Lunar in early 2019.

01:36 So that was about two years of R&D work, prep work.

01:40 Because my job was still at a tech startup,

01:42 I was working easily more than 40 hours a week.

01:45 So for me, it was just trying to manage and squeeze

01:48 and time block whatever I could in the evenings,

01:50 in the mornings, and on the weekends.

01:52 I was making about $130,000 in salary,

01:55 and in May in 2021, basically a couple months

01:58 after our launch, I decided to leave my job

02:00 and go all in on basically this dream job.

02:03 We had bootstrapped, I think, $100,000, $150,000 to start.

02:06 We started homebrewing in our tiny,

02:08 four-square-foot East Village apartment,

02:11 and we just literally Googled how to make seltzer at home.

02:14 We were also watching a bunch of YouTube videos

02:17 of people literally in their garages trying to say,

02:19 this is how I make my hard seltzer.

02:21 The fun part of this business was figuring out

02:24 and R&Ding which flavors we wanted to share

02:27 with the rest of the world.

02:28 Naturally, a place that Kevin and I started

02:30 was from our childhoods and our backgrounds

02:33 as Korean American and Taiwanese Americans.

02:35 For me, the yuzu and the Korean plum were flavors

02:39 that I had grown up with during my time in Korea

02:41 and also in my Korean family.

02:43 And for Kevin, the lychee and passion fruit

02:45 were big representative fruits of his summer

02:48 that he spent in Taiwan whenever he visited his grandmother.

02:51 The process for it was we were buying a bunch of fruits

02:55 and fruit ingredients from the grocery store,

02:57 bringing it back from our trips

02:59 whenever we were visiting Asia and going on sourcing trips.

03:02 We met every two Mondays at evening,

03:04 trying a bunch of different formulations.

03:06 We were going through and assessing a combination

03:08 of obviously does it taste good,

03:09 does it taste like what it should,

03:11 and what we grew up with authentically,

03:13 but also because we were building a business,

03:15 the third factor was can we find scalable sources of it.

03:18 Our landlords definitely did not know

03:19 that we were making moonshine or home brewing alcohol,

03:23 but I believe it's not illegal

03:25 to make for your own consumption.

03:26 We used to host tasting parties of close friends,

03:30 colleagues, and friends of friends,

03:31 but we also had surveys that we were having everyone

03:34 fill out after trying all these various samples.

03:36 Some of the questions included,

03:37 hey, can you guess what this flavor is?

03:39 Do you like it?

03:40 Rate it at a scale of one to five subjectively.

03:42 Any recommendations or anything

03:43 that you would change about it?

03:44 Once the initial first batch is sold out

03:48 immediately on our online retailers

03:50 and we were going viral on social media,

03:52 we thought that was enough of a signal from the market

03:54 to be like, okay, we're really onto something.

03:57 I think it's time to really kick things up a notch.

03:59 We made our first million as a business

04:01 just by pounding pavement here in New York.

04:04 It was during the COVID pandemic still in 2021,

04:08 and Kevin and I were carrying samples in our backpacks

04:11 and visiting all the locations throughout the city.

04:14 And we were starting with places

04:15 that we thought made a lot of sense,

04:16 which were kind of local Asian American restaurants,

04:19 taste makers and chefs and restaurateurs,

04:21 and also local retailers that are target demographic

04:26 of kind of 25 to 35 high earning Asian Americans

04:31 will be shopping at.

04:32 And it's really just building the relationship

04:34 because you're not the first new brand to come up to them

04:37 to say, hey, I have this amazing thing

04:39 that's the best thing since sliced bread,

04:41 and you certainly won't be the last.

04:42 So it's very much about building a relationship

04:45 and that person to person connection

04:46 because at the end of the day,

04:47 these retailers for new brands

04:49 are taking a chance on you as the founder.

04:51 My co-founder Kevin,

04:52 after the Long Island City Trader Joe's opened up,

04:54 he was just shopping there as a consumer.

04:56 And as he was checking out,

04:57 he overheard some of the staff members talking about,

05:00 hey, have you tried this thing called Lunar?

05:01 I just tried it the other day and it was really, really good.

05:03 So after checking out, he walked over and say,

05:06 hey, I didn't mean to eavesdrop,

05:07 but I just couldn't help but notice

05:09 that you guys are talking about Lunar.

05:10 I happen to be one of the co-founders

05:12 and I just live around the block here.

05:13 The team basically yanked the manager

05:15 who was about to walk by and said,

05:17 we need to carry this product, it's amazing.

05:19 And this is the founder and he lives here.

05:20 That was one of our first customers.

05:22 Our activation from first contact at Trader Joe's

05:25 to being on the shelf only took about three weeks.

05:28 So it goes to show that just being a good person

05:31 and also just building relationships just really pays off.

05:34 We get a lot of consumers who come to us over the years

05:37 or months afterwards being like,

05:38 oh my gosh, I found out about you guys

05:40 'cause you were at Trader Joe's and I had to try it

05:42 and I love your product.

05:43 This Korean plum flavor,

05:44 the formulation is, we call it mom approved,

05:47 but it's quite literally true

05:48 because this was the one that we were really struggling

05:50 to nail down before launch.

05:52 I remember Christmas break of 2020,

05:53 I went back home for Christmas

05:55 and I laid out like four or five different cups

05:58 of different, slight different variations

05:59 of this formulation.

06:01 And I was like, mom, I need your help to figure out

06:03 like which one's the one.

06:04 And she went down the line and she gave the answer.

06:07 She was like very critical as a Asian mother would be.

06:10 The one that she chose was the one that we went with

06:12 and that's the one that's still our formulation today.

06:15 (gentle music)

06:17 you

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