Gwen Whiting

Two years after a mass recall and a bacterial outbreak, the founder of the Laundress is on cleanup duty.

- BINDU BANSINATH

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.