My First Million: Vivien Wong, Co-founder Of Little Moons

Vivien Wong and her brother Howard can thank a random TikTok video for delivering a huge boost in demand for Little Moons, their brand of frozen mochi balls — dollops of ice cream encased in rice dough.

Posted by a shopper at the start of the year, the video went viral. It generated over 300m views and led to listings with Asda, Morrisons and Sainsbury’s, adding to deals already in place with Tesco, Waitrose and Ocado.

In the year to June, the London-based business, founded in 2010, hit £36m in retail sales. With 300 employees, Little Moons offers a range of 12 ice cream flavours. The mochi balls are available in 20 countries across Europe and the Middle East, and in Singapore. Last month, the sibling entrepreneurs also launched an ecommerce website, selling Little Moons online.

Did you think you would get to where you are?
In my wildest dreams I never thought we would reach the size we have grown to. Moving in 2010 from our parents’ bakery to our first factory in Wembley, north-west London, seemed such a big step up for us in terms of space. We genuinely thought it would be our forever factory. But in January 2020, we replaced it with one three times bigger, at nearby Park Royal.

When I was at secondary school my parents, who were very entrepreneurial, encouraged me to consider becoming a doctor, lawyer or an accountant. I qualified as an accountant, but the pull to be more like my mother and father was strong.

My brother, who is 36, studied economics at Cambridge. He is responsible for sales and marketing, while I cover operations and finance. Though we have quite different personalities, we are alike in one respect: we never have time to stop and celebrate success, always wanting to focus on what comes next.

Our parents came to Britain from Malaysia to study in the 1960s. They launched a mail order clothing company and later an exotic fish import business, before doing what they really wanted. That was to open a bakery selling traditional south-east Asian cakes and biscuits.

To them, success was about creating products to be proud of and having happy customers, rather than revenue. I think I inherited that ethos. My mother, who did everything from creating recipes to balancing the accounts, is my biggest role model. She is now retired. My father sadly died of cancer in 2018.

Has the coronavirus pandemic affected your business?

In February 2020, the month before the pandemic, we had our highest-ever monthly sales. In March, we decided temporarily to stop production to put the safety of our team first. Our income crashed as we lost our restaurant sales business overnight, which accounted for 50 per cent of turnover.

Furlough was a lifeline for us during the three weeks when we closed. We made changes to our production line and shift patterns to enable social distancing, reopened the factory in April and took everyone off furlough.

Fortunately, orders from supermarkets grew rapidly and more than made up for the loss of restaurant sales. In the past 12 months we have spent £100,000 on PPE, masks, gloves, cleaning equipment and employed eight extra staff to concentrate on Covid hygiene measures.

In January 2021, after a whole year of huge uncertainty and anxiety, a TikTok video was posted of a young lady going to a big Tesco on an adventure to look for Little Moons. Food shopping was one of the few activities allowed during lockdowns.

The video caught on because it gave teenagers and young people something exciting to do to break the monotony. It inspired many others to make the journey to find Little Moons in the shops, and they too shared videos of their discovery. As the days passed, 1,000 videos became 10,000 as the brand went viral on TikTok. On last count there were 315m views of #littlemoons. It felt like almost overnight we had millions of new fans.

What is your basic business philosophy?

Taste is at the centre of everything we do and in food. It is fundamental. You can have the best marketing in the world, but you won’t succeed if the product doesn’t taste great.

It took us two years of product development in our parents’ bakery to perfect my father’s mochi recipe. Mochi is a soft, sweet rice dough. The hard part was to make sure that the mochi dough was the right texture; thin and not too chewy, and that it melted in your mouth.

We aim to make our ice cream the best it can be. We didn’t launch our vegan range until we were confident it tasted as good as traditional dairy ice cream. Our vegan passion fruit and mango flavour took us over a year to develop and is now our bestseller.

Was your first £1m a major milestone?

Our first £1m annual pre-tax profit came in June 2020 which was incredible. This came after the launch of a concession in Selfridges and the listing of Little Moons at Waitrose in 2018 and nationwide in Tesco in 2019.

Did you need to diversify to survive and grow?

We had to adapt quickly and switch our focus from restaurants to supermarkets. Grocery stores are a lot more consumer led. You need to entice people to take your product off the shelf. Instead of diversifying into other products, our priority was breaking through with the core range of mochi ice cream flavours.

With help from our in-house marketing team, who did everything from home, we put more posts on Instagram and social media in general. We sent Little Moons out to influencers and set up competitions with other emerging snack and drinks brands.

What did you have to sacrifice to start the business?

For the first seven years we lived very frugally and reinvested everything back into the business. Only in the past four years have we been profitable enough to pay ourselves properly. I would say the other sacrifice is time. Establishing a business is all-consuming, often at the expense of fitness, travel and relationships.

What was the most challenging period of your career?

It was building our first factory. That took one year. I was clueless, and I did not have the support that I had when building our second factory. The first time round it was just me and the builders. I didn’t have process engineers, I didn’t identify bottlenecks on the line, nor did I know about financial instruments like asset financing.

I lost sleep as cash flow was so tight, but it taught me a valuable lesson. Cash is king. My brother and I put in £50,000 between us, and even moved into a flat together to save money. Working and living together brought its own challenges, as we could never switch off. Our parents also gave us £50,000.

What was your best preparation for business?

The most invaluable preparation was watching how hard my parents worked in their own bakery. I must have started helping them out with small tasks from the age of 12 at weekends. I still run their bakery, but with a team in place to help me. These days I am glad I did my accountancy training.

Do you want to carry on until you drop?

I watched my parents work terribly hard so my brother and I would have every opportunity they did not have. Then my dad developed cancer and died before he could enjoy a long retirement, and it made me re-evaluate my life.

I left a corporate career because I realised life is so short. My passion for the past 11 years has been Little Moons, and I will always be involved in business in some way.

However, I now know life is about balance, not just work. I would like to think that at 60 I will be travelling the world with my husband. Though he is a chef, he is not involved in the business.

Have you made any pension provision?

Little Moons is my pension. I grew up in an era when savers lost a lot of their pension money through unscrupulous financial advisers. After seeing my parents suffer from the near collapse of Equitable Life (the financial services company that ran into financial difficulties in 2000), I feel I have more control over my money through building this business.

Everyone told me at 21 to start a pension, which I did. The idea of saving for the future is important, but there are alternatives. I have a nominal pension in a fund through work, and we of course contribute to our employees’ pensions.

Do you believe in giving something back?

When we heard about NHS nurses and doctors being under so much pressure then unable to find food in supermarkets, we delivered Little Moons to hospitals around London for several months. We also give financial support to the Blurt Foundation, which aims to increase awareness of depression.

What do you consider as an indulgence?

I have a personal trainer once a week, because if you do not keep yourself in good shape mentally and physically, you cannot run a business. By investing in myself like this I am investing in my business. I feel that keenly.

I like running on Hampstead Heath or in Hyde Park with my big greyhound-Labrador cross. The dog helps me switch off from thinking about work issues. When I put my headphones on and listen to some tracks while taking in the views, I feel lucky to live in such a beautiful city.

Post Views: 146