A Taste of Home

Have you ever been to a restaurant where the drink selection just doesn’t pair well with the food?

Sean Ro has, and the experience changed his life.

Sean is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Lunar, an award-winning, Asian American craft hard seltzer brand. He created the brand after joining his co-founder, Kevin Wong, for dinner and drinks at a Korean fried chicken restaurant in New York City. The food was delicious, but the drink selection was a disappointment.

Instead of domestic beer, Sean and Kevin wanted a drink that represented who they are as Asian Americans. When they couldn’t find what they were craving, they made it.

Each can of Lunar is crafted with real fruit and prime ingredients sourced directly from Asia, and each flavor — such as yuzu, lychee, Korean plum and passion fruit — is inspired by Sean’s and Kevin’s upbringings.

“We have something a little bit different with our brand,” says Sean. “It's intentionally meant to be a brand that comes from a different background and uses a lot of the Asian fruits and flavors and culture and is very forward about that.”

Made in New York

Founding Lunar was a right time, right place moment for Sean.

He received a master’s degree in human-computer interaction from CMU in 2014, and then moved to New York City to work for a tech startup.

“I had a big itch for entrepreneurship, which is the reason why I went into startups here in New York,” Sean says. “My first preference was to get into agencies and consultancies, very much like the MHCI program, which is based around the agency and consultancy model. But at that time, the in-house roles were definitely booming, both in terms of prospects and pay potential, too. I figured at least I'd start with a startup role where I can wear a bunch of different hats and understand the balance of building the perfect product versus a good product.”

He went on to work in product management and user experience roles at other startups in various funding stages, and even received what he calls a “mini in-person MBA” from the CEO of Prescriptive Data, an artificial intelligence smart buildings company.

“As that was going on, I think more and more I gravitated towards the idea of starting my own business,” Sean says. “It was a little bit of a right place, right time, right mindset. The lightbulbs went off and I decided to venture into consumer packaged goods.”

Lunar was launched at the end of 2020. Since then, the company has won distribution deals with major retailers in and around New York City, including Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and H Mart.

The brand is a departure from Sean’s business and tech background, but he can see parallels.

“I call this industry half CPG, half service or hospitality,” Sean says. “It is a very relationship-heavy industry still. Lots of business is done on handshakes and eye contact and business cards and a drink or dinner. There is a lot of that component, just given the nature of the industry. It's only as of late where there are the newcomers to the industry like myself, who come from a more traditional tech or business background, who are doing things a little more agilely or differently. But the bare bones in the industry still remain the same.”

Intentionally Authentic

The beverage industry is a perfect fit for Sean, who has always had a variety of skills and interests.

“I was always pretty decent in the left-brain things like the hard sciences, but I was also very interested in the humanities and interested in people,” he says.

His skills and interests are what led him to the University of Virginia, where he received a bachelor’s degree in economics, and then to the MHCI program at CMU.

“The program was a fast-paced, practical capstone-based program that gave me skillsets that played upon that background of left-brain competencies with the right-brain interests,” he says. “A lot of it was how to think and problem solve, how to build products and services, and the tools and the hard skills came along with it.”

He describes his time at CMU as among the most pivotal years of life, because it helped him figure out the type of life he wanted to live and who he wanted to be.

“On the academic side, I think the amount of resources and the freedom that the program, and to a broader degree, the university, gave us to be as intellectually curious and to be ourselves — authentically ourselves — was really, really important,” Sean says.

Today, he’s sharing his authentic self through Lunar. And he hopes the brand, and what it represents, can help other people do the same.

“We get a lot of heartfelt, amazing feedback from the rest of the Asian American Pacific Islander community. And that's something quite special and humbling and an honor for sure. I mean, that was always the intention — to help other folks feel seen. But to actually experience it is also very special.”