At the age of 28, Vivien Wong quit her accounting job with an annual salary of 80,000 pounds (US$109,000; 733,000 yuan; NT$3.479 million) and started making ice cream with her brother.
Growing up in a family-owned bakery, she always dreamed of one day running her own business. She said her father's cancer diagnosis prompted her to take the step to found Little Moons.
This type of mochi, made with soft glutinous rice balls wrapped in ice cream, became a hit on TikTok (the international version of Douyin), but its seemingly overnight success actually took more than ten years in the making.
Vivien shares the lessons she’s learned along the way and the advice she would give to anyone considering starting their own business.
Don't wait until you're ready to start
Vivien said one of the biggest mistakes aspiring entrepreneurs make is waiting for everything to be perfect, so she recommends following the "80:20 rule."
"Don't wait for perfection, because that extra 20% will take you too long and you might miss the market opportunity," she said.
Instead, she recommends getting the product “80 percent complete,” launching it on the market, and then improving it as you go, just as she did at Little Moons.
In the first five years of its business, Vivien sold mochi to restaurants and theaters, and then saved enough funds to invest in brand building and enter supermarkets.
be prepared to make sacrifices
Vivien left her high-paying job and moved in with her brother to save money and plow any profits back into the business.
She recalls leaving a mature and professional working environment in the City, where there was always someone to help, for a world where almost everything was done by her own hands.
"When you run your own business, everything comes back to you, so even though I'm not good at IT, I'm the IT director," she said.
She also had to learn about mechanical equipment, product development, ice cream making, and how to pay wages.
Vivien said she would even handle the company's accounts herself on Sundays instead of hiring a bookkeeper because at the time, saving money was more important than taking time off.
Know your brand
One of Vivien's suggestions to entrepreneurs is to understand the importance of their own brand and learn to say no to opportunities that do not fit the brand's positioning.
“If you know what your brand’s values are, you know how to apply them to a trend, but you also know when to stay out of it,” she says.
"Accept opportunities selectively and don't try to do everything. Stay focused and know what you stand for."
She also reminded not to blindly accept the advice of experts, but to listen and think for yourself.
"You'll find that the advice they give you may be correct for another company, but it may not be appropriate for your specific situation," she said.
She and her brother would discuss the suggestions they received, sometimes accepting them and sometimes rejecting them, and over time the process of making those decisions helped her build confidence.
Maintain a clear distinction between public and private affairs with family members
Vivien said working with her brother was a big advantage, but the two "definitely had a lot of arguments."
They must learn to see each other in the workplace as colleagues rather than brother and sister.
When the company was considering moving from a 5,000-square-foot factory to a new 30,000-square-foot site, and the annual rent increased from about 40,000 pounds to 500,000 pounds, Vivien said that she was more willing to take risks, while her younger brother was more cautious by nature.
But she noted that this difference of opinion actually helped them make better decisions because the two were able to "balance each other out."
Her advice to anyone working with family members is to set boundaries for how each other interacts in the workplace.
"You have to be very careful to respect your brother as a colleague, as a colleague, not as a brother or sister," she said.
Today, Little Moons has a chief executive and a broader leadership team, both of whom are less involved in the company's day-to-day operations. Vivien said this allowed them to "just be sister and brother again."
"Becoming famous overnight" may take years
Little Moons became a TikTok phenomenon during the epidemic, but Vivien said that most people don’t know that the company has actually been in business for ten years.
She said, "Everyone says we became famous overnight, but it actually took us 12 years to do it."
