06/09/2026
ONE YEAR. ❤️
This week marks the first birthday of our little OG Zero shop next door to the current “BIG” shop!
And wow. What a ride the last 12 months have been.
Zero itself turns 10 years old next year. For those first years, we were predominantly a wholesale business — making our products and sending them off to other stores around New Zealand to sell on our behalf, often under their own label.
Then Covid came along and we pretty much lost the lot… 100% of our 32 stockists closed down.
And in one of those rather surreal twists life occasionally throws at you, at almost the same time we were winning Silver at the Australasian Packaging Innovation & Design Awards, we were watching the wholesale business we'd spent years building disappear from underneath us.
One minute, we're being recognised across Australasia for doing something genuinely innovative.
The next, we're wondering what the hell we're going to do next.
So what does any good Kiwi business do? We battled our way back. We rebuilt online. We kept making. Kept tweaking. Kept going.
Determined not to be another casualty.
And then, in what may have been a slightly crazed moment, we signed a lease and opened our own tiny shop in Waihī.
And along you all came… so many of you.
But was it enough? No. We thought we needed more visibility. We thought that meant being on the main road.
After a frustrating and fruitless search, we stopped trying to force it and threw it out to the universe instead.
Turns out, sometimes being relegated around the corner is exactly where you're meant to be. 😉
So we took the opportunity that presented itself and took over the shop next door — more than doubling our retail space while keeping our little OG shop too.
And now, just three months into our new larger space, even more of you have found us… and you keep on finding us. Every day.
And behind the shop, we're still doing what we've always done - formulating and manufacturing our products right here in Waihī. The bottles you pick up from our shelves haven't arrived ready-made from some big factory somewhere else. We make the product. We fill the bottles. We label the bottles. Right here.
We've expanded our ranges. We've developed new products. We've made an enormous amount of stuff. 😂 And we've met literally hundreds of you.
But one of the best parts has been hearing your stories.
How clean your homes are.
How surprised you are that natural cleaning products can "actually work".
How much less product you're using.
And how much money you're saving along the way.
Those conversations mean an awful lot to us because that's exactly what Zero was built to do.
And here's the slightly ridiculous part...
We haven't reached full steam yet.
There is SO much more coming.
So happy first birthday to our little OG shop. 🖤
To everyone who walked through that door, told somebody about us, placed an order, bought a refill bottle, came back again, brought a friend, or simply said “you guys are doing something really cool here” - thank you.
Turns out our little spot around the corner was one of the best things that could have happened to us.
Funny how things work out. 😉
Happy 1st Birthday, Zero Waihī.
Small choices. Big impact.
