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Lindsey’s Key Move: Starting Part Time

When you talk with Lindsey Wieber and her 29-year-old partner, Gwen Whiting, you swear they’re going to begin finishing each other’s sentences. They knew after they met as juniors at Cornell University that they would be going into business together someday. And with The Laundress, which produces a line of detergents for fine cloth, that’s exactly what the duo has done .

Lindsey was working as a sales manager for Chanel, and Gwen was a designer for Ralph Lauren, so their vocational paths still aligned -- just as they did in college. “We’ve always been thinking of ideas together,” Lindsey says. “We talked about a makeup line and a clothing collection.”

But from their work, the two women also recognized a niche in America ’s home-care marketplace that was going unfilled: upscale, high-quality detergents that were worthy of cleaning expensive clothes and domestics.

“People pay $400 for a cashmere sweater, but we know that you’re not supposed to dryclean cashmere or put swimwear in the dryer,” Lindsey says. “Woolite is disgusting and doesn’t do anything. And there’s also nothing appealing about the smell of any detergents in the American market.”

So Gwen and Lindsey launched three years of research into what it would take to come up with a product line that was vastly superior. They tested every conceivable existing product. They debriefed university experts. They took a crash course in chemistry to understand how fabrics and detergents interact. On their travels for their jobs, they shopped the world over.

The line and brand they came up with, The Laundress, reflects ingredients and fragrances that they learned about in every corner of the globe. “We married fragrances with products and functions to make this a better experience,” Lindsey explains.

At the same time, they were working through a Small Business Administration development center at Baruch College to obtain an SBA loan to launch the company. And now, a little more than a year after The Laundress officially got legs, Lindsey and Gwen already are selling their cleaning products – along with travel and storage accessories – in 55 high-end boutiques and other stores throughout North America and in Europe .

Lindsey and Gwen want to continue expanding the proposition of The Laundress as well as their distribution and customer base. “Our original idea was to provide a service along with the products, to be able to educate people about the products’ use as well as to sell them,” Lindsey explains. “But it limits you geographically to do that, and it requires a lot more capital.”

That’s the next phase. For now, The Laundress is helping thousands of consumers launder their high-class duds in high style.

Lindsey’s Key Move: Starting Part Time

Gwen and Lindsey planned all along to launch The Laundress gradually, at first within the tight confines allowed by their day jobs. They simply couldn’t have started the company any other way.

“It’s not like we were living at home with our parents in a suburb and were supported that way,” Lindsey says. “We had high rent, high expenses, and I didn’t have any desire to be a cocktail waitress at night so that we could start our company during the day. I’ve talked with a lot of people who’ve started companies, and basically they had to hook up with a boyfriend and stay in his apartment.”

At the same time, while Gwen had a boss who was understanding and even supportive of her entrepreneurial urge, Lindsey wasn’t so lucky.

So the women improvised a variety of clever ways to start The Laundress part-time, including spending every available evening and weekend together to get the company up and running. For example, Lindsey says, “We did our product naming over the course of one night” in a frenzied brainstorming session.

The business sucked up holidays like a black hole. “We did our business plan on Memorial Day weekend, our financial projections on the Fourth of July, and on Columbus Day we found our manufacturer at a trade show,” Lindsey recalls.

Finally, by mid-2004, they were ready to take the real plunge: quitting their jobs. Their SBA loan had come through. And the business was at the tipping point. “We had clients that needed to be satisfied, and they weren’t satisfied with our not picking up our work phone during the day,” Lindsey says. “It was time to make it happen.”

Lindsey parachuted first because she had the bigger problem working around her full-time position. “I soon became the ‘enemy’ at Gwen’s company because she was still working there, and I was e-mailing her all the time,” Lindsey says.

Now that their corporate careers are in the past and The Laundress is their passion, all those complications are becoming a dim memory. But Lindsey and Gwen know that starting part-time was the only way to make their company happen.

Lindsey’s Bonus Insight:

Early fascination with entrepreneurial ventures is a pretty good predictor that someone will grow up to start and run their own business. That’s clear from the cases of Lindsey and Gwen, who began profit-making enterprises while they were still schoolgirls.

“I started a company painting hat boxes for storage,” Lindsey says. And Gwen made ties for her male friends and teachers that fit the dress code at the private high school she attended.