The U.S. laundry care products market is estimated at $26B, and the dry-cleaning and laundry services sector adds another $10B – yet decades of innovation in that combined market have focused almost exclusively on what happens inside the washing machine, which accounts for barely 1% of a garment’s actual life. As consumers travel more frequently, invest in higher-quality clothing, and embrace resale and rental fashion, the gap between how people live in their clothes and how the industry tells them to care for those clothes has widened considerably. WashWise is a New York-based clothing care company building a new category it calls between-wear care – products designed for the 99% of a garment’s life spent outside the washer. Its debut product, Reset Spray, combines odor neutralization, wrinkle release, light fabric cleansing, and garment refreshing into a single bio-based formula, giving consumers a science-backed alternative to the binary choice of washing or dry cleaning after every wear. In a consumer panel study, 95% of participants said they would rewear a garment after using Reset Spray, and 95% said they would use it in place of dry cleaning.
AlleyWatch sat down with WashWise Founder Maria Cabral Menezes to learn more about the business, its future plans, recent funding round, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
WashWise raised a $1.2M pre-seed round. Investors include FJ Labs, Singh Capital, and Brown Girls Invest, alongside an incredible group of founders and operators including Jack Abraham, Founder of Atomic, Hims & Hers; Alex Jekowsky, Founder and CEO of Cents; Brian Tate, Founder of Oats Overnight; Gigi Howard, Founder of SIO Beauty; Nina Farran, Founder of Fashionkind; and others.
We were very intentional about building a cap table of people who could contribute far beyond capital. I wanted to be able to reach for my phone whenever I had a question—whether about content, distribution, manufacturing, the laundry industry, or something completely unexpected—and know there was an investor I could call who had relevant experience and would be willing to jump on the phone with me.
Tell us about the product or service that WashWise offers.
WashWise is reinventing laundry for the way we live today. We’re traveling more, working out more, investing more in our clothing, and increasingly buying secondhand—yet the way we care for our clothes has barely changed.
Our first focus is the space between wear and wash. Reset Spray, which I often describe as “dry shampoo for clothes,” cleanses, neutralizes odors, and reduces wrinkles so you can refresh and rewear clothes instead of automatically washing or dry cleaning them after every wear.
It’s water-based, bio-based, vegan and non-aerosol, and comes in both full and TSA-friendly travel sizes. The goal is simple: help people wash less, rewear more, and take better care of the clothes they already own.
What inspired the start of WashWise?
Before starting WashWise, I was a trader at Citadel, and I was constantly overspending on dry cleaning, traveling for conferences and trying to figure out how to rewear the clothes I had packed. At home, I had what I now call my “chairdrobe”—a huge pile of clothes that were too clean to wash but somehow didn’t feel fresh enough to rewear. As a result, I kept overwashing clothes that really weren’t dirty.
I remember looking at that pile and thinking: why don’t we have dry shampoo for clothes? We had completely changed the way we think about extending time between washes in beauty, but we were still caring for our clothes in essentially the same binary way: wash them or dry clean them. That frustration became the starting point for WashWise.
How is WashWise different?
While much of the laundry industry is focused on innovating inside the washing machine, we’re focused on the 99% of the time our clothes spend outside of it. We believe there is an enormous opportunity to rethink how we care for clothes between wears, while traveling, in our closets, gym bags and everywhere else they actually live.
What market does WashWise target and how big is it?
We’re creating a new behavior and, ultimately, a new market that we believe could be huge. Today, the U.S. laundry care products market alone is estimated at roughly $26 billion, while U.S. dry-cleaning and laundry services represent another $10+ billion market.
But our ambition isn’t to start by fighting for a slice of the existing laundry pie. We want to expand the pie by creating demand for innovative products that address moments in garment care that traditional laundry products have largely ignored—starting with the space between wear and wash. If we can establish that new behavior and make WashWise synonymous with modern garment care, we believe it gives us the right to eventually enter and innovate within the traditional laundry categories as well.
What’s your business model?
We’re starting DTC-first, with Amazon and TikTok Shop next. Right now, there’s very little product discovery in the traditional laundry aisle—it’s a sea of established brands and bright orange detergent bottles. Because we’re introducing a new behavior, we want to build consumer recognition and demand before going into big-box retail.
How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?
Laundry is a relatively resilient category because, regardless of the economic environment, people still need to care for their clothes. While WashWise sits within the broader premiumization of laundry, Reset Spray also has a very tangible value proposition: a $29 can can replace up to $300 worth of dry cleaning, while helping people wash less and potentially extend the life of the pieces they already own.
What was the funding process like?
It was a pretty humbling dose of reality. I went from trading billions of dollars at Citadel to raising my first million, and those are two completely different experiences. I also knew I wanted to be extremely strategic about the expertise I brought onto our cap table, so I intentionally took my time rather than just optimizing for getting the round closed as quickly as possible.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
The reality is that raising pre-seed, pre-revenue and pre-product in CPG is hard. A lot of funds are happy to take the meeting, but very few actually invest that early in consumer—especially when you’re introducing a product that requires a new behavior rather than slightly tweaking something consumers already understand. Most investors want data proving that the behavior works before taking the risk.
I understand where that comes from, but I also think it can be an extremely conservative way to approach early-stage investing. I would have loved to see PayPal’s earnings before earnings day when I was a trader so I could decide whether to go long or short, too—but that’s simply not how risk and reward work. The biggest opportunities often exist precisely because the outcome hasn’t been proven yet.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
The idea, the size of the opportunity and the vision for WashWise all mattered, but I think more than anything, a lot of our earliest investors were betting on me. Many of them had known me before WashWise and knew how I approach something when I decide I’m going to make it work. I genuinely believe that half of our cap table would have taken the call regardless of what I was building. They weren’t investing because I could show them years of revenue or prove that this new consumer behavior already existed—we couldn’t. They were investing because they knew how relentlessly I go after something I believe in and wanted to be part of building it with me.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
The milestone I care most about is behavioral. I want every time someone takes off a piece of clothing for there to be a mental decision: Is this clean? Is this dirty? And if it’s somewhere in between—let’s WashWise it. If we can own that in-between moment and make WashWise a verb, that’s much more powerful to me than any single six-month metric.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
We act like we don’t have one either. I will never treat $1 of investor capital differently than I treated $1 when I was bankrolling WashWise out of my own savings—not today, and not when we’re profitable.
We’re incredibly scrappy and crafty about how we spend. Raising capital shouldn’t suddenly give you permission to solve every problem by throwing money at it. Constraints force creativity, and some of the best things we’ve done have come from asking, “How can we make this happen without spending a fortune?” My advice is to protect that mentality regardless of how much money you have in the bank.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We’re thinking about the entire lifecycle of our clothes and turning common laundry grievances into innovative products built around the 99% of time our clothes spend outside the washing machine.
Do you hate traveling with a suitcase full of dirty clothes? Or carrying around a workout bag filled with sweaty gear? We may have a solution for that launching very soon.
Ultimately, I want WashWise to be a company that listens obsessively to the everyday frustrations people have with their clothes and builds products to solve them. So if you have a laundry grievance, email me—we may just build the solution.
What’s your favorite summer destination in and around the city?
I love walking over to Nolita, grabbing the salted brown butter gelato from Caffè Paradiso, and sitting in Elizabeth Street Garden. It’s one of my favorite little summer rituals in the city—highly recommend.
