Australian refillables company Zero Co has begun shipping the first of its products to customers this week, after its sustainable approach to household goods garnered a plethora of support from investors big and small. According to founder Mike Smith, it’s the first Australian business committed to solving the single-use plastic problem by offering a 100 per cent recycled and refillable bottle solution for cleaning and personal care products in a closed loop. The business has just closed
closed its seed investment round of $2 million after securing major investment from the private investment fund of Kim Jackson and Atlassian co-founder and co-CEO Scott Farquhar, Skip Capital. Former St George Bank CEO Rob Chapman, Koala founders Dany Milham and Mitch Taylor and Alex Cornish of Cornish Family Investments have also invested in Zero Co.
Smith invested his life savings of $100,000 to start the business before launching a Kickstarter campaign in November 2019. It became Australia’s most funded campaign of the year, gaining $750,000 worth of pre-orders from over 11,000 Australian homes.
Zero Co customers buy a starter pack of ‘forever’ bottles, made from plastic pulled from the ocean in Jakarta, which are designed to be filled with a variety of products for the kitchen, laundry and bathroom. The starter pack includes eco-friendly products delivered in pouches made from plastic diverted from landfill.
“It’s really simple – it works just like the milkman. You order. We deliver. You return. We refill,” Smith told Inside Retail.
Their first national campaign – The Great Australian Plastic Purge – aims to stop 1 million single-use plastic bottles going into landfill in the next 12 months. This will be achieved if Zero Co can reach 20,000 subscribers.
“We are already at 11,500 so we need another 8500 to hit our big audacious goal of stopping 1 million single-use plastic bottles,” he said.
“Every year Aussie households use and throw away almost a billion single-use plastic bottles of things like laundry, handwash and dishwashing detergent. Only about 12 per cent of that gets recycled. So we are sending about 800 million single-use plastic bottles to landfill every year. We are trying to make that zero.”
In a statement about the launch, Skip Capital founder, Kim Jackson, said: “Consumers are demanding more from brands on their environmental footprint and we see a fundamental change happening. I don’t believe you need to choose between great products and the environment, and Zero Co are proving this right now”.
According to Smith, all the Zero Co products have been independently lab tested to guarantee that they work as well, if not better, than the big-name supermarket brands, whilst still being competitive on price. This is important to ensure the idea is scalable, accessible and that people will re-order.
“Our whole model is built around people re-ordering because if they do, then that’s another plastic bottle they are not buying,” said Smith.
The range of 10 plant-based products are made in Australia, grey water safe, palm oil free and vegan and cruelty free. The dishwasher tablets are under development with a plan to release a palm-oil free formula in 2021.
Smith said the products have been designed to be visually appealing since current offerings are “just unsexy”.
“It’s a bit of a Trojan horse. We can make something that’s really awesome and really beautiful and people will buy it just for that reason but then, as a result of that, we are cleaning up the ocean and we are solving the single-use plastic problem, so it’s a double whammy,” he said.
It hasn’t all been easy. A problem with the filling line of one of the products meant that 130,000 laundry liquid pouches had to be hand tightened to avoid leaks during shipping.
“It’s been a nightmare. It’s actually cost us $20,000 of labour to fix this problem, but we know it’s the right thing to do, so that every single customer has the best possible experience with Zero Co on their first delivery and hopefully we can make up that $20,000 somewhere down the track!”