Just before Thanksgiving in 2022, Gwen Whiting was getting her hair done when a friend forwarded her an Instagram post about the Laundress, the line of upscale, plant-derived, low-preservative ecoconscious products that Whiting co-founded in 2002. In 2019, she had sold the company to Unilever for a reported $100 million; two years later, she had finished her employment contract under the conglomerate, which promptly terminated her company email address. Which is why Whiting found out only through her DMs that her former start-up was warning customers to immediately stop using all of its products. Two weeks later, the Laundress recalled some 8 million items: They potentially contained dangerous bacteria that gave consumers unsightly rashes and posed serious infection risks for the immunocompromised.
Under Whiting, the Laundress had fostered a devoted fan base, and many of those customers began to send her messages through Instagram and her personal website. They were asking questions, frantic about their sheets and skin. “I was like, ‘I don’t know what’s going on. I haven’t been there,’” she recalls. One panicked woman told her she had just washed all her cashmere sweaters in soap from the Laundress. “I wanted to say, ‘You’re going to be fine. Don’t panic,’” Whiting tells me. But she dug up her contracts from the sale, looked for the nondisparagement and noncompete clauses, and saw that she would have to stay quiet for another two years.
The silence was “wildly painful,” she tells me in October. “The cleaning community that I built was upset, concerned, scared, nervous, in disbelief, mad. And I just had to sit there and watch it with the dirty sock in my mouth. It made people think that I didn’t care. I mean, that’s what I would think if someone never replied.” We’re sitting in the living room of Whiting’s sprawling Upper East Side apartment beneath the watchful eye of a taxidermied white peacock named Fiona. Unlike the whites of her shuttered Soho store and 1920s Bridgehampton cottage — where she is said to have “the most beautifully appointed laundry room” in all of the Hamptons — the space is loudly decorated in a mix of royal blue, burgundy, and leopard-print upholstery. At one point, she briefly excuses herself to brush her teeth — fastidious cleanliness runs in the family (“I had egg salad; my mom was a dental hygienist,” she explains).
Earlier this year, those clauses expired and Whiting embarked on something of a revenge tour. On podcasts, she has said that, with the Unilever sale, she was unwittingly sending her baby “into foster care,” that she thought the Laundress needed someone bigger and better than she to grow, only to realize the wool had been pulled over her eyes and “there was no one better” for it than she was. She tells me while she feels emotionally responsible for letting loyal customers down, she places the rest of the blame squarely on Unilever’s shoulders. During the 13-month acquisition process, Whiting says, Unilever promised resources, expertise, and support to help the Laundress expand. But after the ink dried, the 13 men present at the deal pitch disappeared and, she adds, the conglomerate failed to provide her with a lawyer or even a way to roll over employees’ 401(k) benefits. (“They were like, ‘No, we don’t know how to do that.’”) Unilever hired Whiting on a two-year contract, which she hoped to use to help smooth the transition to new leadership. Instead, she says, the company gave her a London bank account she couldn’t use in the States. “I didn’t think, naïvely, that it was my responsibility to say, ‘Where’s my bank account tomorrow?’ There was no manners, no ethics, no professionalism.”
At first, Whiting tried to “be very polite” to the new owner, but six months in, she “went into fierce mama-bear mode.” She shuttled back and forth to the Unilever mother ship in New Jersey, where, she says, an HR executive assured her the company “always” messes up acquisitions and fixes them later. But the mess continued. “It’s like you’re on the Titanic,” Whiting says, her blue eyes widening. “It’s like The Wizard of Oz.” She says the company slapped “someone from Brazil, who came from hair conditioner and didn’t even know what Bloomingdale’s is,” on the Laundress. There was only so much she thought she could push back on. “The minute you, as a female founder, start being difficult or calling things out, then you’re the difficult woman,” says Whiting, who is careful not to name names but plays it fast and loose with job titles. She tells me the “least responsible and accountable” Unilever team member was only second from the CEO. “I went to him begging a million times, telling him all the problems and the support that was lacking.” His response? “I don’t have time for you.” But for all the tea she’s willing to spill, even Whiting doesn’t have a postmortem on what exactly went wrong with the products. Did she see any signs that their safety would be compromised? “No,” she says, and leaves it at that. (In a statement last year, Unilever said the contamination took place at one of its third-party manufacturers. The company did not respond to requests for comment.)
When Whiting exited Unilever in early 2021, she was ready to put the cleaning world behind her and move on to other ventures. She was in her mid-40s and thought she might do something in women’s health, namely menopause. “The U.S. health-care system is designed to really only treat women through childbirth. And then there’s nothing, though the majority of our lives are lived after that age bracket,” she says. Still, the recall left her with a sense of unfinished business. The Laundress took a seven-month hiatus and relaunched, but the brand would carry a taint.
“I didn’t want to have to create a cleaning brand,” Whiting says. But signs kept pointing her in that direction. Friends who ran out of the Laundress kept writing her. “What do I use? I’m down to my last drip,” one messaged her. “And I certainly wasn’t going to start buying product at the grocery store, so I really had to do it,” Whiting adds. Her father, who owned a small electronics business and always had close relationships with his customers, was dying. “My dad turned to me from the hospital bed and goes, ‘I’m out of detergent.’ I said, ‘You’ve never once asked me for detergent my entire life.’ It was like God spoke to me through him: ‘Go make detergent, go back.’” She’s out of tissues, and her assistant fetches her an elephant-patterned napkin to wipe her eyes. “I was like, I need to clean up this mess. I need to go back in. I need to make product again.”
When her nondisparagement clause ended, so did the noncompete clause, and this past June, Whiting launched her new aromatherapy-based laundry and cleaning collection, the Fill. Like the Laundress, the Fill aims to make the mundane act of cleaning a little more decadent, but this line, which includes an array of refillable plastic and glass bottles and stain, home, laundry, and fabric-care collections, also incorporates essential oils to “empower and uplift” or “ground and restore” you. “I dictated what everybody’s laundry room looked like for so long, and I was so sick of looking at my shelf — I’m like, ‘Let’s make this shelf look different,’” she says. But the resulting shelf looks … a lot like the Laundress, or at least a cooler, even more sustainable younger sister. Unlike that company’s products, which were packaged in what resembled perfume bottles, the Fill’s cleaning liquids come in pouches — though “if you want to be insane like me, buy vintage crystal decanters,” she says. She lets me sniff the Fill out of one sitting on her table. It smells woodsy and citrusy, like a $25 cocktail.
Some parts of becoming a founder are easier this time. Whiting is no longer a bootstrapped 20-something “sweating all night to pay my rent, making sure my employees could pay their rent.” And though the Laundress was designed to scale, Whiting wants to keep the Fill small. You won’t find it at Bergdorf Goodman or, for that matter, in any stores. On the website, only those who purchase annual memberships ($150 for the founding level, $40 for the basic one) can enter “the Fill Club” and actually make orders. She can afford the exclusivity; after the earlier fiasco, operating on this scale is a welcome change. She won’t tell me how many members there are but says customers are slowly coming back. She even serves as the Fill’s “cleaning concierge,” giving tips to members who write in with questions, like one woman who went to Iceland and came back with a suitcase stinking of musty gloves. Whiting helped her sort out the mess. “She’ll be fine,” she says, a glimmer in her eye. “Wool is a wildly resistant fiber.”
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