JOIN THE REVOLUTION
Choosing a Zero Bar rather than a bottle of shampoo or using a Spaza Store fabric bowl cover instead of clingwrap is about more than zero waste: it’s about incorporating sustainable items into our daily lives – and keeping it local.
Meet two entrepreneurs whose haircare and homeware products add zero waste and double the value
ZERO BAR Bruce Turner
STARTUP COSTS: ‘About R300000 to get Zero Bar off the ground,’ says Bruce.
TURNOVER: ‘After a successful first year of trading, we are sitting on an annual revenue of R2 million.’
After developing a successful and Proudly South African manufacturing company, Bruce Turner decided to open his factory doors to an eco-friendly project, and so Zero Bar was born: cruelty-free, sustainable and environmentally friendly shampoo and body bars.
Have you always been an entrepreneur?
After studying, I starting working for Crabtree & Evelyn, an English and American bath and body brand with a strong English heritage. I worked there for about 13 years and spent a lot of time on the shop floor, learning about retail and importing. All our products were shipped in from Wales.
Then I got fed up with importing. We can’t keep exporting raw stuff and importing the final products
– we need to make the products ourselves. I’d visited a few factories around the world and had seen what manufacturing looked like; I never understood why we couldn’t do it in SA. So I resigned from Crabtree and started The Bespoke Amenities Company. We manufacture and supply hospitality cosmetics.
So Zero Bar is the younger sibling?
Yes! I’ve always had an itch to be more involved in the consumer side of things because everything we do is business to business and hospitality based. In terms of sustainability, we are doing an International Standards Organisation certification in environmental management and are becoming carbon neutral certified.
What is a shampoo bar?
Shampoo bars have been around for years, but aren’t as widely available.
It’s a solid bar made up of oils and other eco-friendly ingredients. Zero Bar came about because we had been looking at different ways to package shampoo to make it more environmentally friendly. Why should shampoo be in a plastic bottle when a solid shampoo bar gives you exactly the same feeling in your hair? It has most of the same ingredients and performs the same way, but the benefit is that you don’t have to package it in plastic.
Also it’s concentrated, so it doesn’t contain water. Most shampoos are about 70 to 75 percent water, whereas ours has no water at all. So you reduce the carbon footprint of transport, increase space in your bathroom and take away the need forplastic – it’s the best solution.
How much plastic is too much plastic?
In the USA it’s estimated that 560 million shampoo bottles are discarded and not recycled each year, so it’s an enormous amount. We worked out recently that we’ve sold enough Zero Bars to eliminate a rugby field-sized block of plastic!
Tell us about your first steps.
In the beginning, my biggest threat was a really good local manufacturer. There weren’t any at the time, so when I started my business, I became the thing I was most worried about. That’s really the first step: identifying and solving a problem, and finding a unique way of doing something that someone else is already doing.
We didn’t have a business plan; we had an idea of what we wanted to do. We were learning as we went. We set ourselves targets and somehow we got there. It was a lot of hard work and a lot of trial and error. If you really believe that what you’re doing solves a problem, you seem to find a way.
Zero Bar is locally produced and manufactured – is that something you are passionate about?
Absolutely. They say, ‘Don’t waste a good crisis,’ and what we’re facing now in terms of Covid-19 is the perfect opportunity to reinvent our economy around manufacturing and supporting Proudly South African goods, and encouraging businesses to relook at what they’re doing to support local economies. The things I’m most passionate about are manufacturing, creating things locally and sustainability. Zero Bar does all of those things.
Website: zerobar.co.za Instagram: @zerowastebar.sa