How Tim O'Sullivan Turned A Korean Hangover Remedy Into Bae Juice
When Pedestrian.TV sat down with Tim O'Sullivan in May 2020 to work out how a bloke in his twenties had built a business from scratch, the answer started with a trip to South Korea. Tim is the…
When Pedestrian.TV sat down with Tim O'Sullivan in May 2020 to work out how a bloke in his twenties had built a business from scratch, the answer started with a trip to South Korea. Tim is the co-founder of Bae Juice, a 100% Korean pear juice marketed for hangover relief, and the idea came from a very specific place. While visiting the family of Sumin Do in South Korea, he noticed locals drinking pear juice around nights of drinking. That observation became the foundation of a product he would go on to build with Sumin and his best friend Liam Gostencnik.
The remedy wasn't just folklore. A 2015 CSIRO report found Korean pears speed up alcohol metabolism and reduce blood acetaldehyde levels, giving the local tradition a grounding Tim could point to as he developed the brand.
The early mechanics of the business were anything but glamorous. Tim describes bootstrapping Bae Juice from the start, with the co-founders giving away their paychecks for six months and "burning ourselves financially" in the process. He explains that a $25,000 loan from Sumin's father was what made it possible to ship the first order of 50,000 units of juice to Melbourne. It was the kind of all-in approach that defined those first months.
Tim's path to founding a company was not a conventional one. He left school as a teenager, skipped university and worked a range of jobs before business, including co-running a family cafe in Melbourne that he helped grow from a modest room into a far larger operation. That hands-on hospitality background fed directly into how he approached getting Bae Juice off the ground.
By the time Pedestrian.TV published the interview, Bae Juice had moved from a Korean kitchen-table discovery to a product stocked across Australian retailers. Tim's story, as he tells it, is less about a single lucky break and more about spotting an opportunity in something locals already trusted and committing fully to turning it into a brand of his own.