When Sarah Cieslinski and JJ Follano launched their sustainable products marketplace in 2018, they had a modest ambition. “I just told Sarah, like, ‘Hey, if you can get a hundred orders a month, that would be like a home run,’ JJ recalls. Neither founder anticipated that within a year, they would transform their small eco-friendly shop into a multimillion-dollar business.
The Zero Waste Store grew from $6,000 in sales in year one to $2 million in sales the second, while continuing to launch unique products as well as house the best sustainable options on the market.
The catalyst for this remarkable growth was Sarah and JJ’s strategic approach to search engine optimization (SEO) that perfectly positioned the brand to capture existing market demand. Read through the steps that took Zero Waste Store to the next level and allowed it to reach a wider audience.
Making a game-changing domain decision
Zero Waste Store began its life under a different name: Earthy Shop. While the brand’s original name aligned with its sustainability mission, JJ—who brought 10 years of marketing experience to the partnership—noticed a significant opportunity through his SEO research.
“I’ve been very heavily integrated with Google ads and search engine optimization,” JJ says. “I saw a trend of a lot of people looking for zero waste products particularly. And I come to find out that ‘zero waste store,’ that domain name, was not being used.”
This wasn’t just any available domain. JJ discovered that the term “zero waste store” and its variations were being searched approximately 10,000 to 15,000 times per month. People online were actively looking for the exact offering he and Sarah had, just using different terminology than their original brand name. “I said, ‘Well, we just started, we’re about a few months in, and I think there’s a really strong play here. So why don’t we rebrand as Zero Waste Store?’” JJ says.
The pair quickly made the decision to rebrand and saw results immediately. “We went from initially doing a few hundred orders a month at most to doing over a million dollars in sales within the first year,” JJ says. This single SEO-driven decision accelerated their growth trajectory dramatically.
Maintaining technical aspects during the transition
If not handled properly, rebranding can harm SEO performance. Zero Waste Store avoided this pitfall through careful preparation and proper tech implementation.
“When you rebrand, a lot of brands aren’t redirecting the URLs from the old domain to the new one, and you actually get a lot of dead links in Google search,” JJ says. “You could potentially lose a lot of the traffic that you’ve gained from your prior branding.”
JJ implemented comprehensive redirects to ensure that all the SEO equity they’d built already with Earthy Shop transferred smoothly to their new Zero Waste Store domain. This technical attention to detail preserved their existing rankings while positioning them to capture the high-volume “zero waste” searches.
Aligning keywords with product and content strategies
In addition to the new domain name, Zero Waste Store strategically aligns its entire product catalog and content with online search patterns in sustainability trends.
“We spent about six months researching and testing,” Sarah says of their initial product selection process. “I tested hundreds of products and we launched with our shampoo and conditioner bars, which today are still our number one bestselling product,” she says.
Sarah’s research isn’t just about finding eco-friendly products—it’s also paired with JJ identifying items with strong search volume that could draw organic traffic. This strategy focuses on products with established search demand, creating immediate visibility and driving traffic to the site.
“In today’s world of SEO, content is king and blogging is the most important thing. You could use a tool called Semrush and you could really start pulling keywords and topic ideas of what people are searching for,” JJ says. The blog posts help them get a jumpstart on organic search engine rankings, which also drives traffic to the site.
SEO insights didn’t just inform Zero Waste Store’s marketing—they shaped the entire business model, including the development of the brand’s own “Essentials” product line.
When JJ noticed search trends for products typically found at a higher price point, he saw an opportunity to provide more affordable alternatives. “Our Essential line is products that everybody’s using every day, but they’re able to buy them, feel good about the purchase because they know it’s sustainable, it’s plastic free, and it’s affordable,” he says.
