On the first day of the fall 2009 semester, dozens of University of Virginia students crowded into a lecture hall for a Calculus III course, dividing their attention between partial derivatives and multiple integrals. Among them were freshmen Sean Ro and Kevin Wong, who would soon become best friends, and a decade later, the cofounders of Lunar Hard Seltzer.
“Not a lot of good came out of that lesson,” Ro, 33, said recently Fortune. “But we met.”
In 2021, the pair launched Lunar, a local craft hard seltzer made with real Asian fruit, designed to be “sweet, but not too sweet.” What started in 2019 as a home-brewing project in a 400-square-foot studio apartment in New York’s East Village neighborhood is now a multimillion-dollar business. Lunar’s four flavors — lychee, yuzu, plum and passion fruit — are sold at retailers including Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and Target throughout New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey and California.
Within three years, Lunar generated total revenue of more than $1 million, but it took a stint at JPMorgan, a risk of mercury poisoning, and a mother’s approval to get there.
The technological brothers
After graduating from UVA in 2013, Ro earned a master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University. “I wasn’t ready to be an adult yet,” he says. He then moved to New York and began working at startups, most recently earning an annual salary of $130,000 as a product manager at Prescriptive Data. Wong, 32, began his career as an investment banker at JPMorgan, then moved into the technology sector. In his most recent role outside of Lunar, he was director of corporate strategy at Yext, earning over $200,000 per year.
On a fateful evening in February 2019, over a fried chicken dinner in New York’s Koreatown, Ro and Wong were discussing the recent boom in Asian-American representation in pop culture, from the film Crazy rich Asians to the 88rising record label. They began discussing other areas where they would like to see representation.
“As we were about to order our next drink on the beer menu, we saw the gap between the foreign imports and the White Claws, Trulys and domestic beers,” Ro said, describing their moment of epiphany. “That’s when we knew exactly where we wanted to be.”
Homemade beer
In 2019, months before the great White Claw shortage, Ro and Wong started homebrewing in their apartments, following the sage wisdom of Reddit threads and YouTube tutorials.
“Our owners definitely didn’t know we were making ‘moonshine,’ or homemade alcohol,” Ro says. “But I think it’s not illegal to produce it for your own consumption, as long as you don’t sell it outside your apartment.”
As they pondered the flavors they wanted to share with the world, the couple naturally drew inspiration from their childhood: For Ro, yuzu and plum were familiar flavors in her Korean family, and for Wong, lychee and passionfruit were representative of the summers she had spent visiting his grandparents in Taiwan.
To find the perfect flavors, they purchased fruit and juice from local grocery stores, as well as brought them back from their trips to Asia, cutting up the fruit to disguise it as airplane snacks and evade customs declarations.
Their beers took two to three weeks at a time, culminating in two years of research and development. Ro recalls an incident in which he used a hydrometer to stir seltzer, but did so too aggressively. The hydrometer shattered, filling the mixture with glass beads and mercury. “Kevin said to me, ‘Hey, what did you do there?’” Ro recalls.
Mom approved
With the mercurial beer thrown out, Ro and Wong began hosting tasting parties with close friends, colleagues and friends of friends in their apartments, serving the hard seltzer from kegs “in a very non-shady way,” Ro insists. They asked their guests to fill out surveys: Can you guess what this flavor is? How do you like it? How would you rate it on a scale of one to five? What would you change about it?
After hosting about 100 people at several tasting parties, Ro and Wong were able to narrow down the final four flavors. Then they taste hundreds of slightly different formulations and, to avoid a hangover, pour the concoctions into their mouths before spitting them out, sommelier-style.
However, the partners needed more help nailing down the final formulation of the Korean plum, so they called in some backup: Ro’s mother. During a trip home to Northern Virginia over the 2020 Christmas holiday, Ro introduced five slightly different variations of Lunar’s Korean plum flavor. “Mom, I need your help to figure out which one is right,” she said.
He followed the line and tested each formulation. “She was very critical, as an Asian mother would be,” Ro said, but he settled on her favorite.
“The one he chose was the one we went with,” Ro says. “And that is still our wording today.”
Simmer
The first batches of Lunar sold out immediately and went viral on social media. “We thought that was enough of a signal from the market to say, okay, we’re really onto something,” Ro says. “I think it’s time to kick things up a notch.”
They started the business with more than $100,000 of their own savings, then raised a round of funding from friends and family and several pre-seed rounds. In 2021, after two years of spending mornings, nights, and weekends brewing perfect beers while still working 9-to-5s, Ro and Wong decided to quit their jobs to focus on their seltzer brand.
They began “beating the pavements here in New York,” Ro says. He and Wong carried the samples in their backpacks and visited potential customers all over the city, starting with local Asian-American restaurants and grocery stores.
“It’s simply about building a relationship,” says Ro. “Because you’re not the first new brand to come to them and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this cool thing that’s the best thing since sliced bread.’ And you definitely won’t be the last.”
Negotiate with Joe
Call it fate, call it timely interception. Wong was shopping at Trader Joe’s in Long Island City in 2022 when he heard staff members raving about Lunar. After trying it, with Everything But the Bagel seasoning in hand, he approached and introduced himself as the co-founder of the brand.
The staff members yanked the store manager and urged him to bring the product into the store. About three weeks later, in March 2022, Lunar was on the shelves of every Trader Joe’s location in New York City. “[Our distributors] they say it was the fastest they’d ever seen from first contact to shelf for a major retailer,” says Ro. (Trader Joe’s declined to comment on specific sales figures.)
“We were selling multiple pallets at most per store in any given month,” Ro says. “We were literally flying off the shelves.”
Lunar then flew to the shelves of even more retailers in New York: it entered Whole Foods and BJ’s Wholesale Club in 2022, and Costco, 99 Ranch and Target in 2023.
Signals on the rise
Lunar is now available in four states and has sold more than a million cans, but it’s an operation that has just three employees, including the cofounders, with a rotation of contractors. They have since stopped brewing beer in their apartments.
“We have long produced our product in a licensed, food safety-rated professional facility in New York state, made with the freshest waters of the Hudson Valley,” says Ro. They source fruit from all over Asia: yuzu from Japan, lychee from Thailand, and plum from South Korea. Ro says they are currently working in the Lunar lab, working on a line of alcoholic fruit teas inspired by boba culture.
Named New York’s second-fastest-growing hard seltzer brand by Nielsen in 2023, Lunar is on the rise, but don’t count on Ro and Wong to celebrate with your own supply.
“I drink a lot less than I used to since I started this business, but I think that’s because I started a business, period.”