Seton Hall seniors Brooke and Madison Loza launched an online marketplace for sustainability- focused products that’s expanded to include a storefront location.
Imagine being able to put an entire year’s worth of trash into a single canning jar, or into a glass container that can hold about a dozen pickle spears. When twin sisters Brooke and Madison Loza saw on YouTube that a woman had accomplished this, they were amazed at the feat and its incredibly low environmental impact.
“It blew my mind,” says Madison, who was in high school at the time and says she’d never really thought about how much waste people produce. “Our family, two adults and four children, were going through four or five trash bags a week.”
The sisters were motivated to take action for the health of the planet. Brooke launched an Instagram account to raise awareness about the negative impacts of waste, such as the increased greenhouse gas emissions from trash decomposing in landfills and exposure to chemicals that seep from plastic waste into the soil, groundwater and waterways. Madison helped create some of the content, which evolved to include practical tips for how to pursue a low-waste lifestyle.
“We realized pretty quickly that many people want to live in more sustainable, eco-friendly ways. There was a lot of interest in the types of products I was demonstrating online,” Brooke says, giving examples such as laundry detergent sheets that come in a biodegradable cardboard box instead of a plastic jug and a compostable phone case (“More than 1 billion [plastic] phone cases are thrown out each year!” she wrote on her @the.eco.twin account).
Recognizing the demand, Brooke and Madison decided to embark on another eco-conscious venture: starting their own business. The sisters felt strongly that they could fill a need they were seeing in the market for easily accessible eco-friendly products.
Together, they opened One Stop Eco Shop, a retail store that sells sustainability-focused home and body products, groceries and composting services. First it was an online-only store, and they used the basement of their family’s home in Brick, New Jersey, as their shipping and receiving headquarters.
As the online store was growing, they focused on sourcing and selling items cleared to meet their environmental impact standards regarding ingredients and raw materials, production processes, packaging, distribution, use, potential reuse and disposal options.
During this phase of business development, Brooke and Madison — now seniors studying nursing at Seton Hall — connected with the University’s Center of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Based in the Stillman School of Business, the center is directed by Susan Scherreik, whom Brooke calls “an amazing mentor.” Scherreik helped them navigate their roles as entrepreneurs and encouraged them to enter business startup competitions. The One Stop Eco Shop co-owners won prize money in three competitions, including the 2023 Pirates Pitch Competition at Seton Hall. The seed funding supported expansion into a physical store located on Fischer Boulevard in Toms River.
Brooke and Madison work there on the weekends and hired an employee to run the shop on weekdays. Unique to the physical store are product refill stations, which don’t rely on single-use plastic containers, as well as access to a composting service in partnership with Un-Waste.
No strangers to trying new things, Brooke and Madison are focused now on creating and selling their own line of products under the One Stop Eco Shop brand. Madison makes many products herself — bar soaps, lip balms and reusable paper towels, for example — and they partner with product manufacturers who share their eco-conscious values. Their goal is to grow their wholesale operation so that consumers can find their products in more places.
They believe this is the right time for them to take risks as business owners.
“We have so much more time to grow,” Brooke says, referring to their youth as a benefit. “People doubted us. But we think, why wait to start a business until you’re in your 50s and have a stable career? Would we have the energy, the money or the time? Waiting feels like an even bigger risk.”
And they’ll be glad to wait on you at One Stop Eco Shop.
Lori (Varga) Riley, M.A. ‘06, is a freelance writer living in New Jersey.
