Some of the world’s biggest problems, like single-use plastic rubbish, can only be solved by entrepreneurs brave enough to walk the talk, says Zero Co Founder Mike Smith.
Australian company Zero Co is on a mission to stop single-use plastic. One year from launch, the Byron Bay personal care and cleaning products brand is already achieving huge milestones, like pulling 10 tonnes of plastic from the ocean to make its refillable ‘forever bottles’ and becoming the most successful start-up to hold a crowd-funding campaign in Australian history.
In less than seven hours, Zero Co raised $5 million on equity crowdfunding platform Birchal from 3082 Australians looking to tackle single-use plastic. The biggest and most successful crowd-funding campaign in Australia until then had reached $3 million in three weeks. Zero Co has also raised $6 million from venture capital firm Square Peg Capital, which reportedly came about from a cold email sent by Zero Co Founder Mike Smith.
On top of this, the start-up has raised $2 million with a private investment round from existing investors, including Skip Capital, headed by Kim Jackson and her husband Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar, Rob Chapman, former CEO of St George Bank and Adelaide Crows chairman, Jennifer Ma, a former director of KPMG, and Alana Burton, former QBE CFO and board member.
In its first year, Zero Co has made $8 million in sales and is projecting to average at roughly $1 million a month. Celebrating its achievements in a style befitting the company and its humble Founder, Zero Co recently announced a $10 million Give-A-Thon initiative to support schools, sports clubs and charities whose revenue has been devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Zero Co’s success story proves that what’s good for business can also be good for the planet. But importantly, the start-up’s honest mission to prevent single-use plastic pollution and its growing fanbase as a result also goes to show the sheer power of perseverance and hope for a better world.
Zero Co: an Aussie’s dream to solve the single-use plastic problem
Mr Smith, who refers to himself as a Used Pouch Salesman, says sustainable business models are the only way forward for the planet. But in order to get there, he says speaking from experience, will take a lot of trial and error. Indeed, when he first came up with the idea for Zero Co and pitched it to almost every VC firm, private equity fund, start-up incubator, accelerator program and environmental organisation in Australia, he was knocked back every single time. But every loss is a lesson, and as he became better at pitching his business idea, his perseverance started to pay off. Importantly, he had hope.
Mr Smith graduated from UNSW Sydney with a Bachelor of Commerce and a major in marketing in 2005, and he got a job at a creative advertising agency where he worked for the next four years. But growing disenchanted with the corporate world, he quit advertising to try his hand at entrepreneurship instead. “I realised pretty quickly that wasn’t my career path – being an advertising person, working out tricky ways to sell sugary, fizzy water to kids wasn’t what I wanted to spend my life doing,” he says.
But the experience left him with some valuable skills. “I really enjoyed coming up with ideas and then trying to work out how to monetise those things. I think I learned that’s really what I wanted to get good at doing: building ideas, working out how to take those ideas and put them in the world to make them real, and then how to scale those ideas. So that’s what led me to take the plunge, quit a pretty decent paying job for a young guy, and go and start my own thing.”