Lunar Arduous Seltzer’s founders give up their 6-figure jobs to start out a multimillion-dollar model promoting out at Dealer Joe’s

“Not much good came out of that class,” Ro, 33, just lately advised Fortune. “But we did meet each other.”

In 2021, the pair launched Lunar, a neighborhood craft onerous seltzer made with actual fruit from Asia, designed to be “sweet, but not too sweet.” What started in 2019 as a home-brewing mission in a 400-square-foot studio condominium in New York’s East Village neighborhood is now a multimillion-dollar enterprise. Lunar’s 4 flavors—lychee, yuzu, plum, and passionfruit—are offered at retailers together with Whole Foods, Dealer Joe’s, and Target all through New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and California. 

Inside three years, Lunar has generated lifetime income of over $1 million—but it surely took a stint at JPMorgan, a detailed name with mercury poisoning, and a mom’s approval to get there.

Tech Bros

After graduating from UVA in 2013, Ro pursued a grasp’s diploma in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. “I wasn’t quite ready to be an adult just yet,” he says. He then relocated to New York and started working at startups, most just lately making a yearly wage of $130,000 as a product supervisor at Prescriptive Information. Wong, 32, kicked off his profession as an funding banker at JPMorgan, then pivoted to the tech trade. In his most up-to-date function exterior Lunar, he served because the director of Company Technique at Yext, making over $200,000 per 12 months.

On one fateful night in February 2019, over a dinner of fried rooster in New York’s Koreatown, Ro and Wong have been discussing the current growth in Asian American illustration in popular culture—from the movie Crazy Rich Asians to the document label 88rising. They started discussing different industries during which they might like to see illustration.

“As we were about to order our next drink on the beer menu, we saw that gap between the foreign imports and the domestic White Claws, Trulys, and beers,” Ro mentioned, describing their light-bulb second. “That’s when we knew exactly where we wanted to be.”

Dwelling Brewing

In 2019, months earlier than the good White Claw shortage, Ro and Wong started home-brewing out of their flats—following the sage knowledge of Reddit threads and YouTube tutorials.

“Our landlords definitely did not know that we were making ‘moonshine,’ or home-brewing alcohol,” Ro says. “But I believe it’s not illegal to make for your own consumption, as long as you’re not selling it out of your apartment.”

Whereas brainstorming flavors they wished to share with the world, the pair naturally drew inspiration from their childhoods—for Ro, yuzu and plum have been acquainted flavors in his Korean household, and for Wong, lychee and passionfruit have been consultant of the summers he’d spent visiting his grandparents in Taiwan.

To seek out the proper flavors, they might purchase fruit and juice from native grocery shops, in addition to bringing them again from their journeys to Asia—chopping the fruit as much as disguise them as airplane snacks and sidestep customs declarations.

Their brews would take two to a few weeks at a time, culminating in two years of analysis and improvement. Ro remembers one incident the place he used a hydrometer to stir the seltzer—however did so too aggressively. The hydrometer shattered, filling the brew with glass and mercury beads. “Kevin was like, ‘Yo, what did you do in there?’” Ro recalled.

Mother-Permitted

With the mercurial brew down the drain, Ro and Wong started internet hosting tasting events with shut associates, colleagues, and associates of associates at their flats, serving the onerous seltzer out of kegs “in a very non-shady way,” Ro insists. They requested their visitors to fill out surveys: Are you able to guess what this taste is? How do you prefer it? What would you price it on a scale of 1 to 5? What would you alter about it? 

After internet hosting about 100 folks throughout a number of tasting events, Ro and Wong have been in a position to slender down the 4 closing flavors. They then style examined tons of of barely totally different formulations, and to keep away from hangovers, would slosh the concoctions round their mouths earlier than spitting them out—the sommelier manner.

Nonetheless, the companions wanted additional assist to nail down the ultimate Korean plum formulation, so that they referred to as in reinforcements: Ro’s mom. Throughout a visit house to Northern Virginia over the Christmas vacation in 2020, Ro laid out 5 barely totally different variations of Lunar’s Korean plum taste. “Mom, I need your help to figure out which one’s the one,” he mentioned.

She went down the road and examined every formulation. “She was very critical, as an Asian mother would be,” Ro mentioned, however she settled on her favourite. 

“The one she chose was the one that we went with,” Ro says. “And that’s still our formulation today.”

Effervescent Up

The preliminary batches of Lunar offered out instantly and went viral on social media. “We thought that was enough of a signal from the market to be like, okay, we’re really onto something,” Ro says. “I think it’s time to kick things up a notch.”

They bootstrapped the enterprise with greater than $100,000 of their very own financial savings, then kicked off a family and friends funding spherical and a number of other pre-seed rounds. In 2021, after two years of spending their mornings, nights, and weekends crafting the proper brews whereas nonetheless working at their 9-to-5s, Ro and Wong determined to give up their jobs to go all-in on their seltzer model.

They started “pounding pavement here in New York,” Ro says. He and Wong would carry samples of their backpacks and go to potential prospects all through town, beginning with native Asian-American eating places and grocery shops.

“It’s really just building the relationship,” Ro says. “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.”

Buying and selling with Joe

Name it destiny, name it well-timed eavesdropping. Wong was procuring on the Trader Joe’s in Lengthy Island Metropolis in 2022 when he overheard employees members raving about Lunar. After trying out, The whole lot However the Bagel seasoning in hand, he went over and launched himself because the cofounder behind the model.

The employees members yanked the shop’s supervisor over and urged him to hold the product in retailer. About three weeks later, in March 2022, Lunar was on cabinets at each Dealer Joe’s location in New York Metropolis. “[Our distributors] say it was the fastest they had ever seen from first contact to the shelf for a major retailer,” Ro says. (Dealer Joe’s declined to touch upon particular gross sales information.)

“We were selling multiple pallets at our peak per store in a given month,” Ro says. “We were quite literally flying off the shelves.” 

Lunar then flew onto the cabinets of much more retailers in New York—it entered Complete Meals and BJ’s Wholesale Club in 2022, and Costco, 99 Ranch, and Target in 2023.

Rising Indicators

Lunar is now obtainable in 4 states and has offered over a million cans, but it surely’s solely a three-employee operation—the cofounders included—with a rotation of contractors. They’ve since upgraded from brewing of their flats.

“We have long been producing our product in a licensed professional food safety graded facility in upstate New York, made with the Hudson Valley’s freshest waters,” Ro says. They supply fruit from throughout Asia—yuzu from Japan, lychee from Thailand, and plum from South Korea. Ro says they’re at the moment laboring within the Lunar lab, engaged on a line of boozy fruit teas impressed by boba tradition.

Named New York’s second-fastest rising onerous seltzer model by Nielsen in 2023, Lunar is on the rise—however don’t rely on Ro and Wong to have fun with their very own provide. 

“I drink far less than I used to since starting this business, but I think it’s because I started a business, period.”