13. Hero Packaging

Revenue: $4.69 million
Growth: 92%
Founders: Anaita Sarkar, 34; Vik Davé, 37
Head Office: Sydney, NSW
Employees: 11
Industry: Retail
Website: https://heropackaging.com.au
Year Founded: 2018

How it started

Anaita Sarkar and Vik Davé were running a business selling personalised fashion accessories online, shipping 80-100 orders a day, when they realised their two daughters were surrounded by a mountain of plastic at home.

That was a wake-up call for how wasteful e-commerce packaging could be. They set out to make compostable shipping mailers made from renewable and compostable ingredients.

Knowing nothing about the industry or manufacturing techniques, they ran a $10-per-day Google ad offering free samples of their product before it existed.

In the first week, 1000 people signed up.

Growth

Hero Packaging is now Australia’s leading zero-waste mailer company, recently adding water-soluble packaging and launching in the US and Canada.

It only took the duo one and a half years to reach their first $1 million in revenue, and their business has grown by an average of 132% year-on-year over the past three years.

Where to next?

The co-founders take customer product requests seriously — when more than 10 customers are after the same thing, they get to work.

After a successful crowdfunding campaign that raised $1.5 million ahead of time, they’re focused on expanding in the $800 billion US e-commerce market, which they say doesn’t have a go-to brand for sustainable packaging.