Lunar Hard Seltzer’s founders quit their 6-figure jobs to start a multimillion-dollar brand selling out at Trader Joe’s

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

In 2021, the pair launched Lunar, a local craft hard seltzer made with real fruit from Asia, designed to be “sweet, but not too sweet.” What began 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 passionfruit—are sold at retailers including Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and Target throughout New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and California. 

Within three years, Lunar has generated lifetime revenue of over $1 million—but it took a stint at JPMorgan, a close call with mercury poisoning, and a mother’s approval to get there.

Tech Bros

After graduating from UVA in 2013, Ro pursued a master’s degree 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 began working at startups, most recently making a yearly salary of $130,000 as a product manager at Prescriptive Data. Wong, 32, kicked off his career as an investment banker at JPMorgan, then pivoted to the tech industry. In his most recent role outside Lunar, he served as the director of Corporate Strategy at Yext, making over $200,000 per year.

On one fateful evening in February 2019, over a dinner of fried chicken 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…