n who ranked #1 – Go For Zero founder Ellie Degraeve.   Degraeve grew up in a hotel owned by her family in Belgium, where she learned the value of hard work and importance of customer service. With a background in business psychology and coaching, she worked for Ahold Delhaize, a Dutch multinational retail and wholesaling company, for six years. She moved to Australia in 2016 and launched Go For Zero in 2018. It is her first e-commerce business.  Ellie Degraeve grew up in her family’s hotel in Belgium – room number 15 – and from an early age, she was taught the value of hard work and customer service.  “My parents were so customer-focused that if someone rang the bell at night, they would get out of bed and make up a room for them,” she told Inside Retail.  She assumed all businesses operated this way, so when her infant daughter kept getting rashes from mainstream baby products, she was surprised to learn that many brands knowingly used harsh ingredients in their formulations.  “I just kept digging deeper. I looked at the lack of government regulations. I read about the unethical manufacturing processes and greenwashing. I was shocked at how companies could do this to their customers,” she recalls.  At the time, there were a number of online retailers specialising in toxin-free and sustainable products in Australia, but they weren’t as transparent or as focused on reducing waste as Degraeve would have liked.  “I wanted one place that ticked all the boxes. It had to be super transparent and honest, it had to choose right over easy, the donations had to be clear. I couldn’t find it, so I decided to start my own,” she says. She opened a pop-up store on the Sunshine Coast as a proof of concept, and after turning over $80,000 in just two months, she launched Go For Zero online in 2018.  But while Degraeve had plenty of retail experience under her belt – she had worked as a business coach and international retail strategist before moving to Australia in 2016 – she didn’t know anything about growing an e-commerce business.  “I had to learn about Google and Facebook advertising,” she says. “Now it’s all very obvious, but in the beginning I had no idea.”  Early on, she started using Instagram Stories to demonstrate products and help educate customers about their environmental benefits. This approach not only gave her instant feedback on which items were in demand, but also boosted Go For Zero’s credibility. Today, it’s one of her key differentiators and a major revenue driver. “People are super confused about sustainability,” she says. “I want to give them hope and motivation, but also the products to make a change.”   Go For Zero now offers more than 2,000 low-waste and toxin-free products, from reusable silicone baking mats and blocks of laundry detergent, to shampoo bars and organic deodorant – all shipped plastic free. It is a certified B Corp and carbon-neutral company, and stocks only Australian-owned brands, with a strong focus on female-founded businesses. It also donates $1 from every order to a number of social and environmental charities, through i=Change.  Last year, Go For Zero received the Telstra Best of Business Award for Promoting Sustainability in Queensland. It was a powerful moment of validation for Degraeve, and she is just getting started.  After a successful 2022 in which she launched 16 own-brand products, partnered with Upparel to recycle old hair ties and increased revenue by nearly 50 per cent, Degraeve is looking to expand the business through a wholesale relationship with one of the country’s biggest retailers and build a mobile app that will enable customers to track their environmental impact.  “I want to rewrite the rules of retail,” she says. “I want to be part of this new model where you have to be transparent, you have to help people make the right decisions, you can’t do greenwashing or fake marketing. Sustainability is not an exception anymore, it should be the norm.”  For Degraeve, Go For Zero is much more than a place to buy products. It’s a vehicle to create change on a much larger scale.