Name: 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
Uploaded: 2024-02-09
Duration: 6 min 19 s
Description: 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.

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.

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

Features

Lunar Hard Seltzer’s founders quit their six-figure jobs to start a multi-million-dollar brand selling out at Trader Joe’s

Lunar Hard Seltzer’s founders quit their six-figure jobs to start a multi-million-dollar brand 

Hi, I'm Sean Rowe. I'm 33 years old and I'm the co founder of Lunar Heart. Seltzer. Lunar is a local Kraft Heart Seltzer made with real Asian fruit. So that is sweet but not too sweet. We have flavors like Korean plum Yuzu Lychee and Passion Fruit. And you can find this at retailers like whole Foods Trader, Joe's target online retailers. 99 Ranch H Mart throughout Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. My co founder, Kevin Wong, he and I first met on the first day of college actually at the University of Virginia. We were both out of state students and didn't have a lot of local friends, Kevin. He started off his career in investment banking here in New York. For me. I took a little detour by going to grad school. I wasn't quite ready to be an adult just yet. So I wanted to stay in school a little bit end up going to Carnegie Mellon. Afterwards I came to New York decided to join tech start ups. And after we came to New York and started a career in tech and finance, we also both had the itch of wanting to be your own bosses and putting our own destiny in our own hands. We knew we wanted to start some sort of a business and we were looking for opportunities and one of the areas that we always came back to was something to do with our identities as Asian Americans. And at this time, there was an upswell of representation in the film, media and arts and music space. And we started looking around what are some other industries that could use a similar level of disruption and representation. And we were having this conversation over a couple of drinks. So naturally as we were about to order our next drink, we saw that there was a white space between kind of the domestic beers and products and Seltzers and the imports. And that's when we knew exactly that's where we wanted to be. So we first came up with the idea of Lunar in early 2019. So that was about two years of R and D work prep work because my job was still at a tech start up. I was working easily more than 40 hours a week. So for me, it was just trying to manage and squeeze and time block whatever I could in the evenings, in the mornings. And on the weekend, I was making about 100 and $30,000 in salary. And in May in 2021 basically, a couple of months after our launch, I decided to leave my job and go all in on. Basically this, this dream job we had bootstrapped, I think 100 100 and $50,000 to start. We started home brewing in our tiny four square foot East Village apartment. And we just literally googled how to make Seltzer at home. We were also watching like a bunch of youtube videos of people literally in their garages trying to say this is how I make my heart. Seltzer. The fun part of this business was figuring out and R and D which flavors we wanted to share with the rest of the world naturally. A place that Kevin and I started was from our childhoods and our backgrounds as Korean American and Taiwanese Americans. For me, the Yuzu and the Korean plum were flavors that I had grown up with during my time in Korea and also in my Korean family. And for Kevin, the Lean Passion Fruit were a big representative fruits of his summer that he spent in Taiwan. Whenever he his grandmother, the process for it was we were, you know, buying a bunch of fruits and food ingredients from the grocery store, bringing it back from our trips whenever we were visiting Asia and going on sourcing trips, we met every two Mondays that evening, trying a bunch of different formulations we were going through and assessing a combination of obviously, does it taste good? Does it taste like what it should? And and you know what we grew up with authentically. But also because we are building a business. The third factor was, you know, can we find scalable sources of it? Our landlords definitely did not know that we were making moonshine or homebrewing alcohol, but I believe it's not illegal to make for your own consumption. We used to host tasting parties of close friends, colleagues, and friends of friends, but we also had surveys that we were having everyone fill out after trying all these various samples. Some of the questions included, hey, can you guess what the flavor is? You like it, you know, rated at a scale of 1 to 5 subjective, any recommendations or anything that you would change about it once the initial first batch is like sold out immediately on our online retailers and we were going viral on social media. We thought that was enough of a signal from the market to be like, OK, we're, we're really on to something. Um I think it's time to really, you know, kick things up the notch. We made our first million as a business just by pounding pavement here in New York. It was during the COVID pandemic still in 2021. And Kevin and I were carrying samples in our backpacks and visiting all the locations throughout the city. And we were starting with places that we thought made a lot of sense which were kind of local Asian American restaurants, taste makers and chefs and restaurateurs and also local retailers that are target demographic of kind of 25 to 35 high earning Asian Americans will be shopping at and it's really just building the relationship because you're not the first new brand to come up to them to say, hey, I have this amazing thing. That's the best thing since sliced bread and you certainly won't be the last. So it's very much about building a relationship and that person is a person connection because at the end of the day, these retailers for new brands are taking a chance on you as the founder, my co founder, Kevin, after the Long Island City trader Joe's opened up, he was just shopping there as a consumer. And as he was checking out, he overheard some of the staff members talking about, hey, have you tried this thing called Lunar? I just tried it the other day and it was really, really good. So after checking out, he walked over and say, hey, I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but I just couldn't help but notice that you guys were talking about Lunar. I happen to be one of the co founders and I just live around the block here. The team basically yanked the manager who was about to walk by and said, we need to carry this product. Amazing. And this is the founder and he lives here. That was one of our first customers. Our activation from first contact at Trader Joe's to being on the shelf only took about three weeks. So it goes to show that, you know, just being, you know, being a good person and also just like building relationships, uh just really pays off. We get a lot of consumers who come to us over the years or months afterwards being like, oh my gosh, I found out about you guys because you were at Trader Joe's and I had to try it and I love your product. This Korean Pung flavor. The formulation is, you know, we call it mom approved, but it's quite literally true because this was the one that we were really struggling to nail down before launch. I remember a Christmas break of 2020. I went back home for Christmas and I laid out like four or five different cups of different slight different variations of this formulation. And I was like mom, I need your help to figure out like which one is the one and she went down the line and she gave the answer. She was like very critical as a Asian mother would be the one that she chose was the one that we went with. And that's the one that's still our formulation today.