On the primary day of the autumn 2009 semester, dozens of College of Virginia college students trickled right into a lecture corridor for a Calculus III course, dividing their focus between partial derivatives and a number of integrals. Amongst them had been freshmen Sean Ro and Kevin Wong, who would quickly grow to be greatest associates, and a decade later, the cofounders of Lunar Laborious Seltzer.
“Not a lot good got here out of that class,” Ro, 33, not too long ago instructed Fortune. “However we did meet one another.”
In 2021, the pair launched Lunar, an area craft arduous seltzer made with actual fruit from Asia, designed to be “candy, however not too candy.” 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 Entire Meals, Dealer Joe’s, and Goal all through New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and California.
Inside three years, Lunar has generated lifetime income of over $1 million—however it took a stint at JPMorgan, an in depth 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-Pc Interplay at Carnegie Mellon College. “I wasn’t fairly able to be an grownup simply but,” he says. He then relocated to New York and started working at startups, most not too long ago making a yearly wage of $130,000 as a product supervisor at Prescriptive Knowledge. Wong, 32, kicked off his profession as an funding banker at JPMorgan, then pivoted to the tech business. In his most up-to-date function exterior Lunar, he served because the director of Company Technique at Yext, making over $200,000 per yr.
On one fateful night in February 2019, over a dinner of fried hen in New York’s Koreatown, Ro and Wong had been discussing the latest growth in Asian American illustration in popular culture—from the movie Loopy Wealthy Asians to the file label 88rising. They started discussing different industries wherein they’d like to see illustration.
“As we had been about to order our subsequent drink on the beer menu, we noticed that hole between the international imports and the home White Claws, Trulys, and beers,” Ro mentioned, describing their light-bulb second. “That’s once we knew precisely the place we wished to be.”
Dwelling Brewing
In 2019, months earlier than the good White Claw scarcity, Ro and Wong started home-brewing out of their residences—following the sage knowledge of Reddit threads and YouTube tutorials.
“Our landlords positively didn’t know that we had been making ‘moonshine,’ or home-brewing alcohol,” Ro says. “However I consider it’s not unlawful to make to your personal consumption, so long as you’re not promoting it out of your condominium.”
Whereas brainstorming flavors they wished to share with the world, the pair naturally drew inspiration from their childhoods—for Ro, yuzu and plum had been acquainted flavors in his Korean household, and for Wong, lychee and passionfruit had been consultant of the summers he’d spent visiting his grandparents in Taiwan.
To seek out the right flavors, they’d purchase fruit and juice from native grocery shops, in addition to bringing them again from their journeys to Asia—reducing the fruit as much as disguise them as airplane snacks and sidestep customs declarations.
Their brews would take two to 3 weeks at a time, culminating in two years of analysis and growth. Ro recollects 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-Accepted
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 residences, serving the arduous seltzer out of kegs “in a really non-shady approach,” Ro insists. They requested their friends to fill out surveys: Are you able to guess what this taste is? How do you prefer it? What would you fee it on a scale of 1 to 5? What would you alter about it?
After internet hosting about 100 individuals throughout a number of tasting events, Ro and Wong had been capable of slim down the 4 closing flavors. They then style examined tons of of barely completely different formulations, and to keep away from hangovers, would slosh the concoctions round their mouths earlier than spitting them out—the sommelier approach.
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 residence to Northern Virginia over the Christmas vacation in 2020, Ro laid out 5 barely completely different variations of Lunar’s Korean plum taste. “Mother, I want your assist to determine which one’s the one,” he mentioned.
She went down the road and examined every formulation. “She was very essential, as an Asian mom could be,” Ro mentioned, however she settled on her favourite.
“The one she selected was the one which we went with,” Ro says. “And that’s nonetheless our formulation immediately.”
Effervescent Up
The preliminary batches of Lunar offered out instantly and went viral on social media. “We thought that was sufficient of a sign from the market to be like, okay, we’re actually onto one thing,” Ro says. “I feel it’s time to kick issues 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 several other pre-seed rounds. In 2021, after two years of spending their mornings, nights, and weekends crafting the right brews whereas nonetheless working at their 9-to-5s, Ro and Wong determined to stop their jobs to go all-in on their seltzer model.
They started “pounding pavement right here in New York,” Ro says. He and Wong would carry samples of their backpacks and go to potential prospects all through the town, beginning with native Asian-American eating places and grocery shops.
“It’s actually simply constructing the connection,” Ro says. “Since you’re not the primary new model to return as much as them to say, ‘Hey, I’ve this superb factor that’s the very best factor since sliced bread.’ And also you definitely gained’t be the final.”
Buying and selling with Joe
Name it destiny, name it well-timed eavesdropping. Wong was procuring on the Dealer Joe’s in Lengthy Island Metropolis in 2022 when he overheard workers members raving about Lunar. After trying out, All the pieces However the Bagel seasoning in hand, he went over and launched himself because the cofounder behind the model.
The workers 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 quickest that they had ever seen from first contact to the shelf for a significant retailer,” Ro says. (Dealer Joe’s declined to touch upon particular gross sales knowledge.)
“We had been promoting a number of pallets at our peak per retailer in a given month,” Ro says. “We had been fairly actually flying off the cabinets.”
Lunar then flew onto the cabinets of much more retailers in New York—it entered Entire Meals and BJ’s Wholesale Membership in 2022, and Costco, 99 Ranch, and Goal in 2023.
Rising Indicators
Lunar is now out there in 4 states and has offered over a million cans, however it’s solely a three-employee operation—the cofounders included—with a rotation of contractors. They’ve since upgraded from brewing of their residences.
“We now have lengthy been producing our product in a licensed skilled meals security 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 arduous seltzer model by Nielsen in 2023, Lunar is on the rise—however don’t depend on Ro and Wong to rejoice with their very own provide.
“I drink far lower than I used to since beginning this enterprise, however I feel it’s as a result of I began a enterprise, interval.”
