I quit my £80,000 job to make ice cream – here’s how

Twelve Years of Quiet Grind Behind a TikTok Ice-Cream Sensation

Constantvpn.com – When Little Moons’ mochi ice-cream balls began flooding TikTok feeds during the pandemic, the internet treated the brand as if it had materialised overnight. In reality, the company had been quietly operating for roughly a decade before a single viral video ever touched its products. Vivien Wong, who co-founded the mochi label with her brother Howard, has spent the years since that viral moment explaining what actually happened behind the scenes: a slow, unglamorous accumulation of manufacturing capability, retail relationships, and operational discipline that made the sudden demand spike survivable rather than catastrophic.

From the Family Bakery to the Accounting Desk

Wong grew up surrounded by the smell of yeast and sugar in her family’s bakery. The dream of running her own food business was never far from her mind, but it sat dormant while she pursued a conventional career. At 28, she was earning £80,000 a year in accounting — a polished, well-compensated role in the City where help was always one phone call away. The decision to walk away crystallised after her father received a cancer diagnosis. That personal shock compressed what might have been years of hesitation into a single, irreversible step.

She moved in with her brother Howard so that household costs would drop and every pound of early revenue could be reinvested into the business. The swap was stark: a structured office environment replaced by a situation in which, as Wong puts it, “all roads lead to you when you run your own business.” She became head of IT despite admitting she was not great with technology. She learned to operate machinery, develop product formulations, make ice cream from scratch, and manage payroll. On Sundays, she sat down and did the company accounts herself rather than hire a bookkeeper, because at that stage saving the cash mattered more than reclaiming the day.

The “80-20 Rule” and Five Years of B2B Sales

Wong’s central piece of advice to would-be founders is deceptively simple: do not wait for perfection. She frames it as an “80-20 rule.”

“Don’t wait for perfection because that extra 20 is going to take you too long and you might miss the market.”

Little Moons followed that logic literally. For its first five years the company sold mochi exclusively to restaurants and cinemas, generating revenue while Wong saved enough capital to fund branding work and eventually negotiate supermarket listings. The product was never “finished” in the way a perfectionist would demand; it was iterated on continuously, customer by customer, shipment by shipment.

Scaling Up: The Factory Question

The most consequential operational decision came when the company weighed moving from a 5,000-square-foot factory to a 30,000-square-foot site. Annual rent would jump from roughly £40,000 to £500,000 — a twelve-fold increase that would have been fatal without the revenue trajectory already in place. Wong says she was the more risk-tolerant sibling on that call; Howard was naturally more cautious. The disagreement, she notes, ultimately produced better decisions because the two “balance each other out.”

Brother and Sister, Colleague and Colleague

Working with a sibling, Wong acknowledges, is simultaneously a strength and a source of friction. “Definitely a lot of arguments” punctuated the early years. The pair had to consciously reframe their relationship at work: not siblings bickering over chores, but two professionals negotiating strategy. Her advice to anyone building a company with family is to set explicit boundaries around workplace interaction.

“You have to be really mindful that you’re being as respectful to your brother as a colleague and you see him as a colleague and not a sibling.”

Now that Little Moons employs a chief executive and a wider leadership team, the siblings have stepped back from day-to-day operations. Wong says the distance has allowed them to “just be brother and sister again” — a small but telling marker of how much the early years demanded.

Brand Discipline and the Art of Saying No

Wong is equally emphatic about knowing what your brand stands for and declining opportunities that do not align. Trends come and go; a founder who chases every one dilutes the identity they spent years building.

“If you know what your brand values are, you know how you can apply that to a trend, but you also know when to leave it alone. Pick and choose what you say yes to and don’t try and do everything. Stay focused, know exactly what you stand for.”

She extends the same scepticism to expert advice. Consultants and industry veterans will offer prescriptions calibrated to their own clients’ contexts. Wong and Howard would discuss each recommendation, sometimes adopt it, sometimes reject it, and over time that process of filtering built her confidence to make independent calls.

“You realise that advice they’re giving you was probably right for another business but not for your specific set of circumstances.”

The Boring Truth Behind the Viral Moment

The pandemic-era TikTok explosion caught a company that had already spent years learning to manufacture at scale, train production staff, navigate export logistics, and supply major UK retailers. Without that infrastructure, the sudden demand spike would likely have broken the operation rather than validated it. Wong sums up the reality of running a food business in a line that strips away the glamour of founder mythology:

“Business is a combination of many, many, many boring things and many boring small steps.”

For the aspiring founder watching a peer’s brand seemingly detonate across social media, the Little Moons story is a reminder that the viral moment is the visible tip of a very long, very unglamorous iceberg. The mochi ball that lands in a teenager’s phone screen has passed through years of supplier negotiations, factory floor training, quality-control iterations, and Sunday-afternoon bookkeeping before it ever gets a close-up. The lesson is not that virality is impossible to achieve; it is that virality without preparation is a liability, and the decade of quiet work is what turns a spike in demand into a sustainable company.