On a late summer night in 2019, Sean Ro and Kevin Wong were winding down at a Korean fried chicken spot when they realized the drink menu fell short: Bud Light, Heineken and domestic imports. “A white space … nothing that looked and felt like me — which is, neither here nor there, both here and there at the same time as an Asian American and a somewhat of the hyphenated and third-culture child,” said Ro.
The two friends had always been looking for an idea and opportunity to start a business together. This lack of Asian-inspired drinks felt like a need they could help fill. They delved into research and development to figure it out. “‘It can’t be that hard, right?’” Ro said. “Spoiler alert, it was a lot harder than we thought at the time.”
Since then, their brand, Lunar Hard Seltzer, has become a staple at Lunar New Year celebrations and high-profile nonprofit events hosted by organizations such as Asia Society. You can also find it on the shelves of Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. The drinks — which they call “the smoothest hard seltzer under the moon” — are made with fruit from Asia like yuzu, lychee and Korean plum and contain no artificial sweeteners.
Lunchbox origins
In a way, the idea for Lunar was a long time coming. Like many children of immigrants, Ro and Wong often felt pressure to hide or avoid packing homemade foods for school lunch. Before kimchi was widely recognized outside the Korean American community, Ro endured teasing over the dishes that were staples at home. Some were intensely flavored, like jeotgal — fermented seafood such as cod roe or chopped squid. These foods were salty, spicy and powerful enough to transform a bowl of rice. To Ro, it was comfort.
To classmates unfamiliar with those flavors, all he heard back then was, “ ‘What is that thing? I can’t recognize it. It smells extremely strong. Like, get that shit out of here,’” he said.
However, once he started college, Ro’s embarrassment fell away to pride. Out of the few Asian kids in his dorm hall, he was the one who kept boxes of Shin Ramen on hand, sharing them with dorm mates who had never tasted anything like it. That evolution made the absence of those flavors in everyday American life painfully obvious. It also became, whether consciously or not, a driving motivation: to bring what was once hidden and deemed strange into the open and to celebrate it.
The training ground
Helping out in his family’s small businesses prepared Ro early on to eventually launch Lunar Seltzer. In delis, dry cleaners and a car wash, he watched his parents. He didn’t think of it as training at the time, but it left a mark. He absorbed an unspoken lesson: Owning your own business means controlling your destiny.
In college, Ro studied user experience and product design at Carnegie Mellon. It was the first time he felt like he had found a professional niche, one that blended creativity with problem-solving. After graduation, he moved to New York, far enough from home to be independent but still within reach of family.
The city became both his training ground and, later, Lunar’s launchpad. Ro worked at startups that included a larger ad tech firm where he felt like a cog in the machine but ended up learning how the machine itself worked. In smaller, pre-seed ventures, he wore many hats and got his first entrepreneurial reps in. His most pivotal stop was at Prescriptive Data, a smart building AI company, where he picked up what he calls a “mini MBA.” There, he honed stakeholder management, decision-making and leadership — skills that would prove crucial when it came time to run Lunar with a tiny team.
Launching the brand
By the time he and Wong launched Lunar in 2021, Ro had built a toolkit that blended design, operations and product management. That versatility became crucial in a consumer beverage business that had to remain scrappy. Even today, with just one full-time employee other than Ro and Wong and a handful of part-timers, Ro leans on those early skills to manage customer relationship systems, oversee production quality assurance or design web prototypes himself.
Ro wanted to have few regrets on his death bed. So he figured it was better to be an entrepreneur in his 20s and 30s, when he had fewer responsibilities and could take more risks.
The very first home-brewed batch of the hard seltzer tasted a little more sour and yeasty than Ro and Wong had imagined. “We weren’t brewing microbiology or fermentation experts at that point,” he said. “So it was, like, ‘huh?’”
But iteration after iteration pushed them closer to the crisp, fruit-forward flavor they were chasing. From the beginning, the seltzers were deeply personal: yuzu honey tea that had warmed Ro during Maryland winters, tangy green plum that tasted like Korea and passion fruit and lychee that reminded Wong of visits to extended family in Taiwan.
All the while, Lunar stayed scrappy. Ro even shouldered the grunt work, lugging 30-pound cases of Lunar on his back through Brooklyn’s summer heat to pitch bodega owners. “It’d be nice to be in a 60-degree office building like I used to be,” Ro recalls thinking. That grind, combined with a focus on community, paid off. Ro, who saw forced schmoozing as “ick,” instead built relationships his own way. From the start, Lunar showed up in AAPI spaces and partnered with cultural organizations — including us here at Epicenter NYC— to unapologetically celebrate its roots.
The strategy built goodwill, “good karma” and showed the brand’s authenticity in a crowded category. It put Lunar on the map and helped them find a lot of distribution partners, supply partners and retail partners. And with Lunar based in New York, it’s a lot easier to make those organic connections as opposed to flying coast to coast, Ro said.
Ro and Wong tapped into the only city, aside from maybe Los Angeles, where a hard seltzer like Lunar could thrive, they say. New Yorkers, they believed, were ready for something different. And they were right. Awards from outlets like VinePair soon followed, giving Lunar credibility with distributors and, as Ro said, “raised eyebrows” from his parents: “Not that they weren’t supportive before, but I guess Asian parents love a good award,” he joked. Distribution wins piled up: Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Target and Fresh Direct.
Even with the momentum, raising capital in a highly regulated industry is difficult, and scaling without burning out requires discipline. One of Ro’s biggest lessons has been patience. “It will take longer than you think,” he said. “Everything will.” Yet he’s learned to trust the process, lean on his support network and remind himself that entrepreneurship isn’t just a career choice. “It’s a life choice,” he said. “You have to be ready for that.”
The team is preparing new innovations, including a hard tea, and beginning to invest in marketing both on the ground and digitally.
Lunar has even caught the eye of unexpected consumers, as Ro learned during a Lunar demo at Bowery Whole Foods: “These two wonderful, sweet Chinese aunties, not our bullseye demographic or folks that are known to be drinkers, but they must have spent like five minutes — which is, in shopper time, an eternity, looking … and were so intrigued and ended up purchasing it.”
Lessons from Lunar
- Doubt is a given. “It’s a classic case of the grass is greener on the other side,” he said, especially when you’re coming from a career or other jobs that offer more stability and benefits like structured paid time off.
- Choose your challenge — and consider what you might regret not doing. “Everything’s hard,” Ro said. “You just have to choose your hard.”
- Entrepreneurship affects more than just your lifestyle but also the people in your life. “It’s not just a career decision — it’s a life decision,” he said. “You have to be ready for that.”
Lean on your support network. “When the times get tough, it is a good opportunity where you find out a lot more about the people around you,” Ro said. Having reliable partners, friends and community allies is crucial when the grind feels endless. Ro calls his partner the “unofficial head of the board” for the critical role she has played in keeping him focused and supported.
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