The use of seeded or pretreated substrates has been reported as a feasible way to control the morphology, texture and orientation of ZnO structures during hydrothermal growth. However, in a typical seeding procedure, high energy-consumption, high-cost, complexity and/or specific substrates are by now required. Electrophoretic deposition (EPD) is a soft solution process that may allow avoiding such problems of classical seeding procedures. In this work, the combination of these two soft solution processing techniques, EPD and hydrothermal growth, has been studied for growing ZnO nanostructures onto stainless steel substrates. The use of ZnO seed layers deposited by EPD as a way to control the evolution of ZnO structures during hydrothermal growth is discussed, showing that the seeding and its nature have an effect on the number of nucleation sites and consequently on the size and morphology of the obtained structures. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.