Vivien Wong

Wong grew up in her parents’ bakery in London; after moving to Britain from Malaysia, her parents manufactured the traditional cakes they missed and supplied them to Asian supermarkets and grocers. From the age of 13 she helped in the factory packing biscuits, and once she had learned to drive she also made deliveries to clients.⁠[1][2][2][2]

She qualified as an accountant and worked at BarclaysBarclaysBarclays is a banking and financial services group headquartered in London, United Kingdom, with Barclays PLC as its parent company. It traces its origins to a London goldsmith bank established in 1690 and developed through bank mergers, overseas expansion and investment banking reorganisations. Its businesses span UK retail and corporate banking, private banking and wealth management, global investment banking and US consumer banking.Open the full entry. After trying ice cream–filled mochi in Japan, she saw a gap in the UK market for Japanese desserts, quit her corporate job, and spent two years perfecting recipes with her brother Howard Wong in the flat they shared.⁠[1][2][1][1]

In 2010 Wong and Howard Wong launched Little Moons, which wraps mochi dough around balls of Italian gelato. The products were first sold through the family bakery, and restaurants were the first market; she put together a booth in a week to exhibit at The Restaurant Show, where she met a number of the chefs the company went on to supply. The brand name comes from the product’s resemblance to a little moon and also echoes a Japanese fable about a rabbit making mochi on the moon.⁠[1][2][2][2][2][2][2]

The two later split their roles: Howard handled sales and marketing, while Wong handled operations and finance.⁠[1]

In 2015 Little Moons launched in Whole Foods, followed by listings in supermarkets including Ocado, Waitrose, and Tesco.⁠[3]

While building its second factory, Little Moons had committed to a 30,000-square-foot site, about six times larger than its existing premises, when the result of the Brexit referendum came through, with half of the company’s sales going to Europe. Wong recalled that Howard wanted to pause and reassess, but she pressed ahead and eventually convinced him, without which the company could never have met the later surge in demand.⁠[1][1][1]

In January 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Little Moons went viral on TikTok. In the week after it went viral, the brand’s sales at Tesco rose by 700%, shelves quickly emptied, and the hashtag #LittleMoons gained nearly 20 million views; within months the company grew from around 100 employees to 400. Wong said the surge was entirely organic and that the brand had been developing for ten years, so it was no overnight success.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][1][1]

Little Moons was initially self-funded by its founders. In March 2022, the consumer-focused private equity firm L Catterton Europe acquired a significant minority shareholding in Little Moons to support its accelerated growth and international expansion. The same year, Little Moons received the Queen’s Award for Export.⁠[4][5][5][6]

As of April 2025, Little Moons had a turnover of more than £50 million, was sold in UK supermarkets including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Ocado, and Asda, and exported to about 35 countries (not including the United States); former Graze boss Joanna Allen had become chief executive in 2024. Wong said the UK had been hit harder by the cost-of-living crisis than any other country the company supplied and that international markets were key to growth; she also said many large own-brand manufacturers around the world were trying to replicate its product, but that legally challenging supermarkets would be a fool’s errand because they had not copied the brand’s branding.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4][4]

That month Wong was shortlisted for the Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Award as one of three nominees; the award went to Julia Hoggett, chief executive of the London Stock Exchange. At the awards panel she said the ice cream market had been “the graveyard of innovation” and advised people to “stop limiting your beliefs and go for it.”⁠[4][6][6][6][6]

On August 27, 2025, The Venture Room published a compilation of street interviews filmed on London’s Kings Road that included a segment with Wong. She said on the show that Little Moons had made about 50 million the previous year, that the founders had started with £50,000 to buy machinery for test production, and that the brand had taken 15 years to build; many people think it was an overnight success, but it took a lot of graft.⁠[7][7][7][7]

“Just saving money means you’re losing money in the long run.” She believes in investing so that money works for you rather than you just working for money, and in having the confidence to ask others how to make your money work while you sleep (at 07:49 in the video).⁠[7][7]

“How can my business build the habit to solve that problem?” She recommended James Clear’s Atomic Habits and gave the example of salting a frozen car park: doing it yourself solves the problem once, but the real question is how the business can build a habit to solve it, and a business should be run every day with that systems mindset (at 08:21 in the video).⁠[7][7]

“We’re not niche market. We’re 50% of the population.” Asked what she would do if starting again, she said medicine is rarely tested on female bodies and that there is huge space for newcomers in female health (at 07:07 in the video).⁠[7]

Little Moons: Official website: https://www.littlemoons.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[8]