Alum shares story of chocolate startup success

For alumnae Lucia Liu, success is sweet.

At a Wharton Women event on Tuesday night, 2010 College graduate Lucia Liu described her journey from a corporate job to starting her own chocolate company, Lululosophy.

“After graduating from Penn, there is the sentiment that you need to find a great company to work for,” Liu said. “But you realize there are other ways of living.”

Liu started Lululosophy, an artisan chocolate company, in New York City as a way to combine her love for Asian flavors and creativity. After graduating with a bachelor’s in communication and consumer psychology, Liu worked for American Express for several years before realizing she wanted to do something more creative. Contemplating between attending business school or joining a startup, Liu decided to take a break and traveled across Asia, where she found a host of flavors not found in chocolates in the Western Hemisphere.

“I was sitting in [a] Taiwan tea shop, thinking no one does chocolate with tea,” Liu said. “Chocolate is a really fun, interesting way to introduce flavors.”

Back in Manhattan, Liu began experimenting and developed a signature line of tea-infused truffles. She then entered her chocolates in a competition hosted by Smorgasburg, a food market in Brooklyn, and won. By April 2014, she had quit her job and was selling her product.

“I had to use my savings to start up, but I either would have spent money on business school,” Liu said. “It was such a risk to quit my job, yet sometimes everything falls into place.”

Today, Lululosophy has a full line of colorful, fun-shaped chocolates, ranging from maple whiskey to Thai tea, which sell online and wholesale to hotels and shops. Liu shared a couple flavors, as well as her story, to a room full of Penn students.

To get the audience to fully enjoy the chocolates, Liu explained how chocolate is made and guided the audience in a six-step process of tasting it.

“I didn’t know there was a correct way of tasting chocolate, but it did taste better,” Wharton freshman Melissa Matalon said. “I actually could taste the champagne and whiskey.”

Wharton and Engineering junior Natalie Borowski, who is also the vice president of university relations for Wharton Women, said the club chose Liu as a speaker to show young women other routes in business.

“We try to get speakers who are in more than [finance] and consulting,” Borowski said. “Chocolate tasting is much more interactive. We had originally 120 RSVP, but we had to cap it [at] 60. Having that much interest was amazing.”

Liu said that students may see her chocolates at Houston Hall one day, though she ultimately wants to keep the business small and hands-on.

“With chocolate, there is no right or wrong," Liu said.  You can be as playful as you want to be."

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