Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Good morning and welcome to today’s Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping Jazz, Soul and Blues. My guest today, I am very pleased to say, is Vivien Wong, Co-Founder of Little Moons, the ice-cream and mochi dessert brand. Growing up in their parents’ bakery in London, Vivien and her brother, Howard, were they say, inspired by their parents’ passion and craft and their drive to innovate. Despite qualifying as an accountant – no shame there, Vivien – Vivien felt she was destined to follow their entrepreneurial path and after trying ice-cream filled mochi in Japan, she experienced a lightbulb moment, as she says. Spotting a gap in the UK market for Japanese desserts, Vivien quit her corporate job and spent two years perfecting recipes from the flat she and Howard shared. Little Moons was launched in 2010, selling their creations first from the family bakery and now to restaurants and supermarkets in twenty countries across Europe, the Middle East and in Singapore as well. I’ll be talking to Vivien in just a few minutes about all of this and the significant impact of a teenager’s TikTok video that raised their fanbase and sales by an extraordinary amount – I won’t reveal it just yet, you’ll have to wait and see.
It’s lovely to meet you. My kids love your Little Moons, my wife loves your Little Moons, my friends love your Little Moons. You talk a lot, and I’ve listened to you and done some research obviously and taste is really important to you. Tell me a little bit about your own love of food.
Vivien Wong
Well, my brother and I, who Co-Founded the business with me, we grew up in a family bakery, whereby my parents manufactured traditional cakes that they missed when they moved over from Malaysia and so I always learnt how they really cared about taste and craft because this is how they presented themselves to the world really, through their goods, and it gave them a lot of pride to see people eating those cakes. So, taste has always been really important to us, it’s something that we’ve learnt from my parents so when we decided to start our own business, of course we wanted to make the best tasting desserts we possibly can and we’ve worked really hard on our ice-cream and so, I’m so proud to hear that you say everyone loves it from all generations, it’s just something that we’ve really aspired to and it’s incredible.
Elliot Moss
We’ll get on to the marketing and TikTok and 300 million views of a video and the films across the piece and all that but, yeah, I mean I’m interested in the tasting because the product has to be good. I think we live in a world where it’s all too easy to market something to death and have absolutely no substance. It seems like you’re quite the opposite to that.
Vivien Wong
Absolutely. I really… I think authenticity is so important to us and we constantly try and improve our recipes.
Elliot Moss
Is it a family thing? I mean, I guess that’s what… you mentioned your parents, you mentioned the bakery. I’ve had Asma Khan on the show last year, I think, and she’s Darjeeling Express, Founder, and she said that when especially immigrants, people, you know, your parents obviously moved across and you said it’s this… the reason they did it in a way was to get the taste of home. Do you think that’s what drove them at the beginning?
Vivien Wong
Yes. Absolutely. I listened to that podcast, I was really, I thought it was a beautiful podcast and I’ve eaten at her restaurant before so she always speaks at those dinners but absolutely, I think being a child of immigrants, you really do have to be of substance, of craft and be authentic, it’s just in my blood to be that way and I think in a generation where, I know we’ve done very well on social media but it’s very easy to sort of fake that reality. We’ve had to work really hard for it and so that is reflected in our product, it is all about an authentic taste, we use real ingredients, real fruit in there and I think you can… I think it shines through.
Elliot Moss
It definitely shines through. Stay with me for much more from my Business Shaper today, it’s Vivien Wong, Co-Founder of Little Moons and we’ll be talking about lots of substance that shines through, which is a nice thing, a slight juxtaposition there and we don’t go that way but we will today. It’s time for some more music right now, this is Melody Gardot and Sting with Little Something.
Melody Gardot and Sting with Little Something. We’re talking about Little Moons today, it’s Vivien Wong and she’s my Business Shaper, she’s the Co-Founder of Little Moons and if you’re not familiar with them, they’re mochi balls, they’re sweet, they’re actually completely delicious and they’re little so you don’t feel too guilty about it. Becoming an entrepreneur and the move from this, you know, I imagine first generation born here in the UK, the desire from mum and dad to do something proper because we’ve come here, we want you to do this, go to a great school, do all that other stuff, when you told them that you were jacking it in and you were going to do your own thing, what was their reaction?
Vivien Wong
Do you know, it’s quite interesting because for me, my mum always, always told me it’s really important for women to have their own business because it’s difficult in the world of business for women particularly if you want to have children, to find time for yourself, to find time to take care of your kids, so for me, she was very happy when I decided to do that but I guess my brother, he was in investment banking and I think she wasn’t disappointed but it wasn’t so sort of expected that my brother would join the business too but she’s so happy now and we’ve really enjoyed working together so it was definitely the right thing for us to do.
Elliot Moss
And if you can remember your dad’s reaction, what was his because obviously they’re both busy there running the bakery, that’s what they do, they’ve grafted and now, Vivien and then Howard pile in go actually Mum and Dad, we’re off.
Vivien Wong
I don’t remember my dad’s first reaction, he was a man, he was quite quiet but I think he was quietly proud, he’s always been very quietly proud of us and so it just meant that we spent more time with them, we developed the recipe for the mochi dough with my father really closely because he’d been making mochi for thirty years and so it was really, it was really nice to spend that much time with your parents because I think it’s not something you get a chance to do and so it was really nice to grow it together.
Elliot Moss
And in terms of you going through the University thing, being an accountant and all that and then switching to a much less structured world called being an entrepreneur, figuring out what the recipe was, having a different view of time, you know, many, many people who work in business work on a schedule and there’s deadlines and it’s not necessarily your own. What was that like, if you can recall at the beginning, that kind of looseness if you like?
Vivien Wong
It did take some getting used to but I do really value my years when I worked in the corporate world because I think it gave me a discipline and it showed me how a professional world worked because I think if I didn’t have that, you don’t give yourself that structure and so I did, I really relished that freedom because I was starting to feel quite stifled by the sort of regime of life when you work in the corporate world and one of the first things I did was get a dog because I just felt I loved that I could have that control of my time, I’d have time to walk him in the mornings and the evenings but, you know, you have to be very structured when you are starting a business and make sure that you set your own deadlines but you also have to be quite fluid and be comfortable with uncertainty and just, you know, problem solve a thousand issues a day, for example, I was now head of IT so if my computer didn’t work there wasn’t a telephone number I could just dial and have some chap come over and help me, so I just had to learn very quickly how to resolve lots of issues.
Elliot Moss
And do you think you took to it like a duck to water or was it a little bit tougher than that?
Vivien Wong
It did take some getting used to but watching my parents, watching my mum who is incredibly resourceful, I think I learnt a lot from them in terms of, you know, how to pivot on a day-to-day basis so I think all that time working with them in the bakery during school holidays and the weekends, I learnt a lot through probably osmosis.
Elliot Moss
And now here we are and we’ll come on and talk a lot more about the present but 2022, sales in the many millions, about 300 people that work for you, give or take, that about right?
Vivien Wong
Err yeah, and then we have some agency staff as well, depending on demand.
Elliot Moss
Quite a few people from those humble beginnings. It’s a good story. Stay with me for much more from my guest, Vivien Wong, she’s the Co-Founder of Little Moons and she’ll be back very shortly. Right now though, we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Innovation Series, a brand new podcast coming very soon to all the major podcast platforms. Natasha Knight invites business Founders to share their industry insights and practical advice for those of you thinking about getting into an industry and starting your very own thing, just like Vivien. In this clip, focussed on retail, we hear Taymoor Atighetchi, Founder and CEO of Papier, an online stationery brand.
All our former Business Shapers await you on the Jazz Shapers podcast and indeed you can delight in this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice. Or if you have got a smart speaker, do ask it to play Jazz Shapers and there you will find a taster of our recent shows. But back to today, it’s Vivien Wong in the hot seat, Co-Founder of Little Moons – I should say the cold seat, actually the frozen seat – Co-Founder of Little Moons, the ice-cream and mochi dessert brand. So, you developed the ingredients, things are going quite smoothly and quite methodically, I mean you strike me as quite a structured person, you’re the… I was reading, you are the operations person and Howard, your brother, is marketing and sales.
Vivien Wong
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
So, you’ve got to be, and obviously with a financial background, it means that you have to understand numbers and you have to make sure that you have money in the bank and so on and so forth. Basic things around cashflow. The business has grown and did grow up into around 2015 I think, on a pretty nice trajectory, or a bit further on actually, maybe it’s even moving into around 2018 and then this thing called TikTok happens and at that point the business was a few million pounds and was doing pretty well, you know, we read about social media, people talk about new ways of communicating. Your brand, Little Moons, exploded on social media and obviously the substance of the thing works and people like tasting it but something happened. In your wildest dreams, and just to be clear, 300 million plus videos and sales, 700% up in a very short period of time – I said I’d reveal it and now I have – why? I mean, why do you think that capitalised this incredible change in your business?
Vivien Wong
I think that one, we’d been developing this business for ten years so we weren’t an overnight success, so we’d laid some foundations of a great brand that people like engaging with but the TikTok, I don’t know what you’d call it, like a vent or phenomenon, we were just lucky, I think it was the right product at the right time, everyone was locked up, the only sort of permissible adventure we could go on, was going to the supermarket and so it just captured everyone’s imagination that you could go to the supermarket or they called it Big Tesco’s at the time, it was one of the only retailers that stocked us, that, Ocado and Waitrose, and everyone just wanted to go on this adventure to look for these Little Moons, like what were they? And it was just incredible watching how it unfolded and Charlie, who heads up our TikTok, she said, ‘ooh, we’re getting quite a few views on TikTok and this was like, you know, we were a couple of thousand and we were like, ‘oh that’s interesting, awesome, let’s, you know, let’s keep tracking it’ and a couple of days later that turned to 10 million, 20 million and we were like, ‘holy smokes, like, where’s this going to go?’ And then we started, I started watching all the videos, downloaded TikTok, started watching them and they were just so incredible to see everyone just trying to get them and this was on the back of lockdown, it was so, so difficult to get machinery to then, you know, increase production to meet this huge demand and I think a lot of people thought that we were limiting it on purpose but we just couldn’t get the labour, you couldn’t train people, we couldn’t, you know, the lead time for machines was months because there’s no chips or anything so it really was a real struggle for us as a business to try and meet that demand but it was also just wonderful, I’m not complaining, it was so lovey because we’d been trying to be listed in Asda and Morrison’s and Sainsbury’s and it’s a difficult, it’s difficult to get buyers’ attention and so it was really nice to have them call us and say, ‘hi, we’d really like to stock you, could we start arranging that’ and so, yeah, it was a beautiful year for us.
Elliot Moss
And were you, at first, shocked by this, I mean, you know, people put together business plans and they are very, usually they are pretty well thought through and you’re a structured person and all that and then along comes this event and by the way, I just want to quickly ask, did you know when you saw the idea for the oh yeah, we could put something on TikTok, or this is what… you know, did you guys create the adventure idea or was that, did that just grow of its own volition?
Vivien Wong
No. That was absolutely organic.
Elliot Moss
It just happened.
Vivien Wong
Just happened, which makes it even more special that it wasn’t even something we’d seeded, it was, I think there were like maybe two videos, we don’t… because of TikTok, you don’t know the first video that posted but for some reason the algorithm just caught, everyone started watching it and loved it and I don’t know how that worked but it was great for us.
Elliot Moss
In terms of it coming in this unstructured way, were you happy to adapt to it or were you able to adapt to a quick, you mentioned the issues with the supply chain and all those other things but deep down, were you like, this is the best thing that’s ever happened, we’re going to make it work?
Vivien Wong
Absolutely. I think with business, there is structure but then there’s a huge amount of uncertainty and there’s never a straight line in business, if there’s anything I’ve learnt, it’s lots of squiggles and sometimes you go backwards before you even go forwards and left and right and all over the place so, yes, although you try to be structured, I had to… we had to pivot and try and find as many solutions as we possibly could. We weren’t necessarily shocked by it but I was quite proud by it and we have a little store in Selfridge’s in London and we had queues down the road, all the way down to Oxford Street, so we took on mum to it to see it, she was super proud but they had security out, it was like you were queueing for, I don’t know, the opening of like a club or tickets for a concert or something, it was absolutely incredible to watch and I was just proud, I wasn’t necessarily shocked as such but it was just such a lovely feeling to have so many people finally recognise your product that you’ve been developing over, you know, over ten years it’s taken us.
Elliot Moss
Family seems to me like an important part of you and where you’ve come from and what informs your world view. You mentioned it’s good working with your brother, or you said it historically. Is it still good working with your brother and is there ever a kind of pulling rank because you’re the older sister?
Vivien Wong
No, we don’t really have that, I think, you know, actually the first five years were probably the hardest between us because it’s so difficult to get a business off the ground at that point and then as we grew we brought on a senior leadership team that really helped so we all sat around the table and shared ideas with really smart people and that really helped our relationship too but just because we had more people to bounce ideas off, we also did a personality test, you know the colours you can do, and we found out that we were polar opposites, you couldn’t actually be any different and I think it just really explained so much about the way that we approach things and it just meant that we really respected each other’s views on how we handled things and then also segregating the roles really helped because we used to do everything together and then we split the roles so he did sales and marketing and I did operations and finance and I think when you have those defined roles, it gives you accountability and you just, you know which areas you need to cover off so, I think as the business has grown, our relationship has probably gotten stronger and we do work better now I would say than we did at the beginning.
Elliot Moss
So, give me a quick example of when, you know, you have a polar opposite view of the same thing. Did you react in a different way to him when the TikTok phenomenon happened or was that more like, this is great, let’s just go?
Vivien Wong
No, that was marketing and I was like, go for it Howard, I just need to go figure out how to make everything and that’s down to me so, that was how it was great that we split that. An example of how we react to things, when we were building our second factory, we had committed to this huge factory, 30,000 square foot, which was probably six times larger than our current place, the place that we were at, and then the Brexit vote came through and 50% of our sales go to Europe and so he was more apprehensive about it than I was, I wanted to continue going and he said look, we’ve got to stop and assess but ultimately I said, what have we got to lose, we either lose the small business that have that we’ve got such a market to go for, we’ve got to go for it and I finally convinced him and so we went for it and had we not done that, there is no way we would ever have met the demand from TikTok.
Elliot Moss
What I take from that is that you’re a bit punchier and confident and he’s a bit more thoughtful. Is that…?
Vivien Wong
Yeah, my brother’s definitely a deep thinker, he’s incredibly intelligent and I think I’m much more sort of, I don’t know how to put it, maybe I have more of a gut feel for things, I am more practical so, that’s why we’re good because it’s good to have that balance because you can’t just have someone just, you know, thinking about things all the time and not making decisions and then you’ve got to have someone who wants to make decisions but to have the right discussion first so…
Elliot Moss
Vivien and Howard together are the perfect combo. Stay with me for my final chat with Vivien and we’ve also got some Brazilian magic, something a little different from Eliane Elias, that’s all coming up in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Vivien Wong is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes. Reading about the business and this trajectory you’ve been on and I love the juxtaposition between you and Howard in terms of, you know that great balance between doing stuff but also thinking. The business is impregnated with values. I was reading about the sharing is caring campaign, the involvement you did with donated products, the Felix Project, which I’m familiar with, where you are giving food to kids who haven’t got food to eat and so on. Many businesses do this but your desire to do it, was it first-hand experience? Was it a sense of your being lucky yourself? I mean, where did the desire to do good things come from?
Vivien Wong
It’s just our upbringing really, I do feel really fortunate that we’ve had a very privileged upbringing and so it’s always good to give back and I also think because in a world where I feel out of control in many areas of the way that everything’s playing out, I think where you can affect change is by using your business so, we both believe that we want to have a culture in our business where everyone enjoys coming to work because we spend so much of out time there and so we have, we try to have a culture where everyone feels heard and valued, which isn’t necessarily what I experienced when I was growing up sometimes in the corporate world so I learnt how to run a business but also how not to run a business but also externally, I think it’s so important to give back to your community and we have a team of people that really feel that way as well in our business and our head of people and all of our senior leadership team really want to give back so that’s the culture in our business that it’s really important to give back to the community and we do so in as many ways as we can.
Elliot Moss
You hold your responsibility very lightly to me, Vivien, in the sense that this business is going gang busters, it’s big, there are lots of people, there are factories, there’s all sorts of questions but you don’t look stressed. Is that just you’re a really good actress or is it because you actually are just in your element and this is what you are meant to do?
Vivien Wong
I love what I do. I have such a fulfilled life, running all of these different elements of business, like, you know, I know Howard’s part of marketing but obviously I’m involved as well and I just love that whole mix of everything that I need to do. To be honest, the last two years have been incredibly stressful and I think it’s taken a huge personal toll on my health, not that I’m unhealthy but it’s been incredibly stressful and I went away over Christmas, over two weeks, and I just feel so much more like refreshed and relaxed and ready for the next year and I think that’s really important as well, to take some time out and one of the charities that we support is called Blurt and it’s about mental health and I was giving a podcast about how it’s important to take time for self-care and mental health and I actually wasn’t doing that myself and that’s why I took some time out and just had a holiday and it was the first time I’ve switched off properly in ten years because our factory had shut down for essential maintenance and that’s probably why, today, I am looking and sounding more refreshed but it’s been a really, really tough two years. With the whole Covid that’s happened as well, like, we shut our factory down. With that many people, you just don’t know what to do, there’s no real guidance at the beginning, in the first two weeks and we were so worried about our workforce and then after that, there we had a TikTok boom in Germany as well, which took a lot of our stock and then the Brexit migration happened in December 2020 so we had to ship loads of product over to Europe all of a sudden just because people were panic buying and then January happened and we had the TikTok craze in the UK and so we just didn’t have enough stock to… so it’s been a crazy two years of dealing with sort of very… external issues, so now…
Elliot Moss
Have you made a promise though to look after yourself and to kind of do that self-care thing because I imagine again, it’s very easy to get swept away in the responsibility and the exigences of the things you just have to deal with?
Vivien Wong
I always try and promise that but I think naturally, work comes first for me. I… it’s because it’s what I love, it’s my whole life, I can’t really switch off, I don’t want to, I’m constantly living it so, I will try and take care of myself and you know, we were talking about working out and that’s really made a difference so I’m trying to work out four days a week, really early, like 6.00 am just because by the time I get into work I’m sucked in for the rest of the day and so I am, I have made a pledge to myself to take care of my health.
Elliot Moss
Good. It’s been really lovely talking to you. Thank you and thank you for the gifts, which we are going to eat in due course and the team will enjoy those. Just before I let you go, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Vivien Wong
My song choice is Acker Bilk, Stranger on the Shore and it’s because my dad used to play it and I think he used to hum like the first rift of it and it just takes me back, like food, it just takes you back to a certain time in your life and I can just hear him, I don’t know, washing the car or something. That’s my song.
Elliot Moss
That was Acker Bilk with Stranger on the Shore, the song choice of my Business Shaper, Vivien Wong. She talked about the importance of her family and the work ethic that she saw first-hand. She talked about business never being in a straight line, how it goes left and right and up and down and how true is that. And finally, in this environment versus twenty years ago or even ten years ago or even five years ago, everybody must be seen and must be heard and must be valued. It absolutely is at the centre of every single business endeavour. That’s it from Jazz Shapers and me, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds of more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to Mishcon.com/JazzShapers.