Tim O’Sullivan has never been happier running his multimillion-dollar Bae Juice business, but there’s just one catch: He is doing it with his ex-girlfriend.
Tim, 30, and his ex-girlfriend, Sumin Do, started their business when they were in love and a couple.
Sumin is from South Korea and in 2019 Tim travelled home with her to meet her family, where he was introduced to pear juice.
Tim said he drank lots of socially on the trip and that pear juice helped him through hangovers.
“I was dumbfounded. I thought it was the coolest thing ever,” he said.
Tim was so impressed with the drink that when he returned to Australia, he pitched it to his best mate Liam as a business idea.
“It was natural and cheap to manufacture and no one in Australia sold it,” he told news.com.au.
That’s how Bae Juice was born.
Tim, Liam and Sumin have called it a “hangover drink”, and the drink is described as being “packed with goodness”.
The three of them put in $500 each a week and “lived like bums” for six months, and then Sumin’s dad pitched in to pay for their first crate of the juice.
From there, they went from “store to store” and sold the beverage to over 100 stores. They got their big break when Woolworths wanted to stock the beverage.
“We’ve had pretty rapid growth from there,” Tim explained.
Bae Juice is now stocked in over 4000 stores, with Tim describing it as really “pinch yourself stuff” to be able to walk in major supermarkets and liquor stores and see your product on the shelves.
However, Tim and Sumin broke up in the middle of the pandemic, just as the juice brand was taking off.
Tim said that, in hindsight, it was “getting too much”. They were spending 15 hours a day together working on the business.
The 30-year-old said that he has so much vision and gets excited and Sumin wanted more work-life balance.
“She wanted to have date nights and hang out and do couple stuff, and I just wanted to go to the moon,” he said.
“We started going down different paths.”
Tim said that he was 100 per cent committed to the juice brand around the clock, while Sumin wanted to go on holidays.
He wanted to “knuckle down” and build the business, ultimately at the expense of his personal life.
Before they officially called it quits romantically, Tim had called everyone for their advice.
“I called my parents for advice; I called my sister, who has been through some heartbreak,” he said.
After talking it through with everyone, he concluded that their romantic relationship needed to end.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he said.
“When you’re together for five years, and you’ve travelled together, and you own a business together. You’re going to get married and have kids.”
Tim said it was really hard to swallow the idea that their romantic relationship just wasn’t working anymore.
“It was traumatising,” he said.
There was also the fact they still had to see each other everyday because they were still working together.
“At the start, it was pretty difficult, and we were going through our emotions, but we had to keep going,” he said.
“There were moments where she was like ‘I don’t want to do this’, but we kept pushing on.”
Plus, there was their business partner Liam to consider, who was officially trapped in the middle of it.
“Liam was in the thick of it,” Tim said.
He was stuck offering support to both of them while still working with them and, at times, it all felt impossibly messy.
Sumin decided to return home to South Korea and work on the business remotely, which gave them both some time to regroup and rethink their relationship.
“Everything was happening. We had no capital or investment, and we were still bootstrapping, and there was just stuff that had to get done,” he said.
Tim said it helped that he remained doggedly focused on the business, so Sumin could see that his desire to “work more” wasn’t just an excuse to end their relationship.
“Sumin found her place. She’s a lady boss, got us better prices, and really stepped into her role,” he said.
Three years later, they are in an “amazing” place where they work together every day.
Sumin’s been back to Australia twice, and Tim and Liam will pick her up from the airport and drop her off again.
They are in a space where they are good at “looking out for each other” and are happy as business partners.
“It couldn’t be better, but it is crazy”, Tim said.
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Originally published as Tim O’Sullivan reveals the wild break-up story behind his multimillion-dollar business
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