Zero Co
Smart50 Rising Star Award winner
This year’s Rising Star winner is Zero Co, an eco-friendly cleaning and body care brand that has an audacious mission to untrash the planet from single-use plastic.
Before Zero Co became a reality, founder Mike Smith and his wife had spent 18 months travelling to the most far-flung corners of the world. Smith had just sold his last company and was ready to go remote and venture deep into the wilderness.
“We went to places like North Korea, Kamchatka, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and I was constantly left deeply disconcerted at finding our planet’s most beautiful and remote landscapes covered in plastic,” Smith said.
When they returned, Smith identified a gap in the personal care and home cleaning sectors which, at the time, were not the slightest bit sexy or sustainable, and often held no brand loyalty with consumers. He realised that if he was going to solve this gargantuan problem, Zero Co needed to help humans do two things: stop making single-use plastic and clean up the plastic already in the oceans.
Since launching just a couple of years ago, Zero Co has stopped more than 1.6 million water bottles worth of plastic from being made. Smith has also delivered 18 major ocean and beach clean-up initiatives in Australia, pulling a staggering 1.2 million water bottles worth of rubbish from the ocean.
The business is on track to deliver $20 million in headline sales within its first two years of business, representing 23,000% growth since launch. They are also on track to sign-up their 70,000th Aussie household — all without the scale and presence of supermarket distribution.
With Zero Co expected to be in more than 300 stores around the country thanks to a full-scale national retail rollout this year, the future — and our environment — is looking ever-brighter.
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