Transcript of A Multimillion Dollar Deal, a Product Recall and a New Chapter: Gwen Whiting on the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Acquisitions

Today's episode includes descriptions of sexual assault. Please take care while listening. For a lot of founders, selling your company is the ultimate dream. But for Gwen Whiting, that dream was actually a bit of a nightmare. Gwen's the entrepreneur behind The Laundress, the cult favorite brand that turned laundry into a luxury business without a single dollar of outside funding. Gwen sold The Laundress to Unilever for a reported $100 million. But after she left, the recalls started. We talk about how she built it, what really happened during the Unilever acquisition, and the fallout that followed. In the show notes, I'll also link the articles that Unilever responded to so you can see their side of the story. Gwen also shares what she wishes she knew before she signed on the dotted line and why she's back now in the game with her new venture, The Fill. We also talk about how Gwen manages professional challenges while dealing with personal ones. At the end of our conversation, Gwen shares her experience as one of the 567 known survivors of a now disgraced Columbia OB-GYN. It is a brave and important conversation about personal trauma, public accountability, and reclaiming your voice.

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Welcome to Money Rehab.

Thank you. I'm so happy to see you.

I'm so happy to see you. It's been 100 years, it feels like, but it hasn't. It's been seven?

Six and a half. That's in dog years, it's 100.

I know. The pandemic happened, you built, you grew, you sold, you broke up with- Rebirthed.

A lot of things have happened.

We got a lot to catch up on, sister. So let's start with when we met, you were building Laundras.

We met, actually. I think I just sold.

The way you described to me made me a believer. Like, your passion about laundry, I had never, not once, not ever really thought critically about my laundry, and I completely just wanted to buy whatever you were selling. So I did. But tell me why you decided to sex up the laundry business.

I mean, to me, it was just such a personal need. The landscape of products and options for cleaning in 2002 when I started and I launched in 2004 was super limited. It was the garbage at the grocery store and a dry cleaner. That was it. The vocabulary for me, I was a designer, apparel designer. I had a textile background, but there wasn't the terms white space or this. It wasn't until after 2008, '09, when people just woke up and were like, Oh, here's an opportunity. I'm going to do mattresses. This was my own personal need. And it was so obvious that it could be better, and it should be better.

But you were not an entrepreneur before, right? I mean, that also wasn't really a word in 2002.

You were a business owner where you started a business, where you ran a business. My dad had his own small business and ran a company. So I came from a house that was a lifestyle, was creating a business and a life for yourself. And in college, I had lots of ideas. And I started. I started a Thai business in high school. I had a business plan in college that I did a lot of research and went down the road but needed a job.

I think there are a couple kinds of founders, one who wants to be a founder, so they are out there hunting for a business idea, and another one who has a business idea, so they become a founder. It sounds like you were a little bit of both.

I wasn't like, Oh, I need to start something. It was like, I want to get a job. I want to create. I want to do all these things. But then this was the idea that was worth going for. And I did it on a smaller, cottage industry level, those other ways. But this was really the big business idea versus a small side hobby or a passion or something fun to do.

Yeah. And when you started, also the idea of raising money and taking on VC was not as popular.

Yeah. It wasn't a thing. It wasn't a roadmap. It was something that I didn't know how to I do. I built a very small, responsible, bootstrapped company very, very differently. I built with credit card debt instead.

Well, so you never raised money for the laundry? No. You had a SBA loan?

Yeah. I launched with a $100,000 SBA loan. That was the money that funded my first production run in the launch. But that doesn't last very long.

No. And when you were in In those early days, how did you get into the credit card funding zone? Because a lot of entrepreneurs, if they're going to bootstrap, there are good days, there are bad days. You have to get scrappy and creative.

Scrappy. I mean, I say that my 16 years of The Laundress was a never-ending startup. It was scrappy through and through the end. And self-funding, that's just the nature of the game. You don't get money thrown at you to build a lux office or throw money just out there just to spend it because you have it. It's a very different approach. So there's a bottom line and a responsibility and a compromise for every spend. But I never carried a credit card balance in my life. That was not something that our family did. Our family didn't even use credit cards. We had a credit card for rental cars to travel once a year. It wasn't a thing. And I was raised that credit card debt was the worst thing you could ever do possible. But the money, the $100,000 went quickly in an inventory-based company. You have to buy your inventory. And I needed access to cash. And it's very comical because there was this small mini female founder movement, a very mini movement. And they're like, Oh, you're a woman. You can get money. And that was really small loans that were at 9 %.

And the interest rates then were 2, 3 %. So it was better to get a credit card APR and a $20,000 line of credit. And then that continued. And this is the day when you actually got the applications in the mail. And I would probably get an envelope almost once a week. And if you just filled it out, they actually gave you a card and a line of credit. So I was like, I became a pro at rolling over credit card debt from one card to the other and jumping APRs and jumping credit limits. And a quarter million dollars later, that's how I funded the laundered, and that all came down in 2008 with a financial crisis.

Yeah. I mean, the way you talk about that is similar to how my husband, who's an entrepreneur, talks about it, just getting through COVID, through credit cards to try to make payroll. I bootstrapped my business. It's a slog every day, and it sounds like there's a lot of memories that probably stick out to you of things that you did to try to save money. I don't know if you've seen the Instagram trend That's the unhinged things I did early in my career. But do you remember any?

Oh, my gosh. I mean, it was unhinged for the whole time. What I put myself through and that carrying that debt and living hand to mouth all those years is incredibly unhealthy. And everything's trending. And on Instagram, when people see and think this is such a sexy, luxurious lifestyle to be a founder and get money thrown at you. And I go to these events and it's like, I'm Series C and Series B and Series, Series, Series. And it's like, A, I don't know what you're talking about. B, that's not impressive to me. That's such a badge of honor. And I'm the outlier who walked away with selling my company with the majority ownership. So it's a very different landscape of at the end of the day, what presents as sexy versus the reality of keeping your company and keeping your equity and having that versus giving it away all those years.

Totally agree. It's something that I get asked all the time, too. And I'm like, I don't understand how this has gotten to be the thing that every entrepreneur wants to do, because I started, I'm sure you started to be your own boss.

To be your own boss, exactly. It's like the minute you raise money, you just gave your You just gave that away. You're not your boss anymore, and you have stakeholders, and you just gave your autonomy and authority away, independence, the whole thing.

Were you tempted at times to take on outside capital?

No, because No, because as horrible as it was, I knew that I couldn't give any part away for my own protection.

So did you have an idea of what you ultimately wanted the outcome to be?

I mean, I loved what I did, and I'm so passionate about it, which you experience. I was so focused on just getting through the day and the week the month and the year. And so I had a concept of... The business plan that I wrote was a five-year plan of you do it for five years and you exit. And at the time, we When writing that in 2002, the only other brands that had a niche or a small brand or a creator brand outside of the giant corporate structure were acquired really quickly. It was Bobby Brown and Blissba and Frederick Fekai and Bumblemote. There's a handful of really small niche, prestige brands that was the birth of something non them, giant CPG. And their track records were really quick acquisitions. So I just assumed that that was the lifespan of this journey. Not because I wanted to exit or understood what that even meant. I just thought that's how that worked. And then the 2008 financial crisis changed that. And then you wake up one day and it's 16 years later and you're still doing it. But I did expect to exit, not from a financial perspective, not like, Oh, I'm going to cash my chips and have a windfall.

And that was never part of my understanding or sensibility of it. My feeling was that I could only take my brand and my company so far and a giant or a larger parent company. I needed that for my brand to go to the next step.

Why did you think that?

Because it just seemed like it was needed to be bigger and to get into different distribution categories and things that I didn't necessarily have experience with. Maybe I didn't have that much also interest in getting into the grocery store business, but I just was like, Okay, that's for someone else who does that. And again, this is also the understanding of what happened in the landscape, what other brand trajectories were.

And knowing what you know now, what would you tell?

I mean, that no one is more qualified or competent or passionate or the vision of the brand than me, period. But I was also in a complicated situation. I I'm saddened by what happened, but I can't regret it because I was in a very, very complicated, toxic partnership work environment. So I did what I had to do, but I didn't expect the outcome.

So how did we even get to that outcome? So 16 years later, spoiler alert, Unilever acquired The Lawnerist in 2019 for a reported $100 million. I heard that they first approached you?

They came into my store on Prince Street. I had a retail store on Prince Street. I started talking to my sales associate. It was so bizarre. It was completely unprofessional. And you always are like, What are you doing here? Are you sussing out? Are you copying? Are you looking at the competition? What are you doing? And you're having a dialog with someone from my team, which is also strange.

But they're not wearing a Unilever polo shoes.

No, but they was like, What are you doing? Can I help you? What are you looking for? Where are you from? And he's like, Oh, I'm from Unilever. I'm from Ohio. Is Gwen here? I was like, what?

That's crazy.

It's crazy. So this woman calls me from the store at my office 30 blocks away, and she's like, Gwen, I think you need to get down here right now. There's a guy here from Unilever. And I was like, please pass the phone, put him on the phone. And I was like, Excuse me, what are you doing? You're in my store in my space, in front of my team. If you want to have a conversation, do you want to call me back? You want to step outside and call me back?

And then what happened?

So then the dialog, he stepped out and called me back. But I guess in retrospect, I should have been like, What is up with these people? This is their process.

I mean, it's wild because I think some people have this delusion that they're going to be discovered on It was on the street back in the day. Exactly. Sure. They're going to be like, modeling scouts or something. But that's not a thing in entrepreneurship. I mean, you joke about the idea that you didn't know about an exit. Of course, you knew more than you're giving yourself credit for. But typically, a sale process, you get a bank or you do a process, the whole thing. Somebody doesn't just- Show up. Undercover boss show up.

Yeah, exactly. And I always said, because the story was the last thing on the business plan to-do list, because it was important to me to feature and showcase my whole vision in a brick and mortar place that you could understand what the whole world of the laundry was. And I came from Ralph Lauren. I was a designer for Ralph Lauren, so we were very much in this creating of a world and an environment. And so my whole vision was on the website. You could be on a shelf in the container store, Bloomingdale's or whatever. And I had stores in Asia, but I was I need to have my own showcase. And I joke that it's like hanging the fly paper, and one day someone would walk in. I didn't actually mean that, literally. But it happened. That's exactly what happened.

So without talking about specific numbers, I know you can't. So this guy steps outside, he goes into your store, you start a negotiation.

So, yeah, the next call was like, Come to New Jersey and kiss the ring. That was the week after.

So a meeting with the executive team, it sounds like. Correct. What was the opening offer?

Or what did they- So then that started the dialog of, Do you want to be in the family? You don't live in family, drinking the Kool-Aid. And I always believe that my brand acquire or ideal date for the prom was seventh Generation. I thought we shared a value system, and I was just the prestige version in a shared ecological product value system. Then when seventh Generation was acquired by Unilever about three years before us, I was like, Okay, they care. That started the discussion, but the negotiation went on for 13 months. It was quite disastrous. Their first offer was a joke, and the response was like, This is a joke, correct? We are a incredibly profitable business, and there was no value in our valuation to them of being profitable. And I was like, You just paid this stupid ketchup company who's not even profitable this amount. Are you kidding me? We're a perfect, pristine, clean, profitable business. Where's the value in that? And they're like, Oh, we had to pay that investor guy and the Belgians, and they were jerks. And I was like, Oh, I'm sorry, because we don't have a pool of investors.

So you think you can get off cheap over here?

Did you think about saying no?

I did say no. I was like, Yeah, no. I don't think so.

But they kept coming back.

Yeah. It was a long process.

So it sounds like they got to the terms that you wanted.

Yeah.

And were you truly willing to walk away if they didn't? Because I think that's where the strength in any negotiation lies, when you're truly, truly willing to walk away.

Yeah. I do have to give credit to our female banker who made all that happen. And she was like, she knew the terms, and she got them where they needed to be. And that was really her doing of getting that done.

How did you find her? Or if another founder, probably not in the same way that it happened to you, but if they got approached for some M&A transaction, what do you do?

That was a really clanky, awkward situation because we weren't ready for market. And because we had never raised money, we never had any of this system set up, where if you raise money, then you I have done a little bit of... You have this deal structure, you have your lawyers, you have some of that slightly put together or way more put together than me just operating a normal business. And my business partner and I were not on the same page in any shape or form. So that was a whole another layer to this. So we fumbled with a lot of not great fit in the very beginning and trying to get to the right team. This was actually recommended by Unilever because she had done the Dollar Shave Club deals. And so she had done big deals. And my business partner didn't understand. She was like, That's like taking a divorce attorney recommendation from your husband, you're divorcing. And I was like, You don't really get it. They like to do business with who they know. That's how a lot of these companies are. They want to work with the people that they know. And certainly, her precedence was like, she shook every penny for the Dollar Shave Club.

So this woman was not giving businesses away.

And I know there was so much ick that followed. But at that point, if we could go back, I'm Sure, or I'm hoping that you celebrated when the acquisition happened.

Yeah. So the night before the deal closed officially at nine o'clock on Monday morning, and everything was so touch and go and a nail plater to the last minute. But on Friday afternoon, it was all set up. The wires were set, the press release was set. Everything was set. So on Friday afternoon, I called the guy who did my New York wedding dinner at the Waverly Inn and set up the back room at the Waverly Inn on Sunday night. And I just started calling people and I said, Hey, any chance you're free for dinner on Sunday night? And so all these people showed up and they just thought it was my husband and I invited them for dinner. And I got my mom in and there was 35 people. And my mom walks in and sees my best friend from Boston. I was like, What are you doing here? Everyone thought I was rolling with a baby. They thought it was like a babe. My mom was desperate. It was a baby announcement. And instead, I had sold my baby. So it was a surprise cell party the night before.

That's cool. And when the wire actually hit, how did you feel?

It was a very unbelievable gasping moment. And I was sitting at my desk chair in my open floor plan, and my team didn't even know yet. And I'm just having this moment of, Holy shit. Holy shit. And trying to keep it together. And my business partnership was so toxic. There wasn't even a hug, high five, we did it.

Did you feel at that moment that you did it? There are a lot of founders who go through a depression after selling their company, you refer to it as selling your baby, which a lot of founders do. So was there mixed emotions at that point, or were you just on cloud nine?

I didn't really comprehend what happened or was happening. I was in such adrenaline mode for all those years. I had a trip planned right after, so I literally left right away and went to France with some girlfriends that was planned and had an amazing girls' weekend, and then was in Switzerland. I remember I couldn't breathe in Switzerland. And I was like, What is going on? And I had so much adrenaline that it was pumping and I had nowhere to put it. And it was giving me this gasping, unbearable chest pain that I couldn't breathe because I was like, I don't need all of this anymore, and I have nowhere to put it. So there was that initial physical response. But I had a two-year contract, and I understood my contract that I continued as is. And it was very awkward of what is my role? How does this work in my mama bear, protect everybody mode? So I went from We were all a team, and then I pivoted to mama bear. I got to protect everybody and protect my tribe here. But I kept waiting for, where's the system system of Unilever? Where is it?

And this is where things went off the rails, which was, I said we had this perfect plan in the deal room to execute, follow. It was so perfect. It was just like, here's the path to success. This is amazing. And then that literally got left in the deal room. Never surfaced. And there was no one in charge or this is your person or this is the process. There was this enormous ambiguity of, you don't own it, but we don't have anyone. You're not in charge, but you are in charge. But it was like a disaster. There was no process at all.

So it was basically the same?

It was the same, but you're floating in the Unilever sea. If they were just like, You are here and just we'll call you, we'll have a monthly call. So it was like, Where's the lame? And then they start throwing garbage at you, unqualified people and processes that make no sense and accounting firms for no reason. It was just this never-ending toss of processes that were pointless and had no value. And if anyone is listening and goes through an earn out, you will never get paid because of all that crap that they throw at you that you have no control over. Luckily, I didn't have an earn out. But if I did have an earn out, I would have zero takeaway within the first three to six months because they throw out this layers and process and nonsense. I was incredibly profitable. But after the six months of Unilever nonsense, no.

And just for layman's terms, can you explain what an earn out is?

Sure. It's like the salesmanship when they dangle the carrot and tell you how much more you're going to make because they're so awesome and they know everything and you don't, and they're going to make you so much more money. And then you're like, Okay, great. I'll keep an upside for all that amazing money that you're going to make and bring into our organization. And so you only take a certain % off at the table at the sale, and you leave a open amount for your future upside. But from my experience and what I know of other Unilever deals, no one gets an upside because they say it's not based on sales or EBITDA or whatever, but fundamentally, they throw all this expense at you, which then affects your bottom line and your EBITDA. And you, as a seller, generally have no control over what they throw into your organization.

Yeah, it's similar to book sales. So So you can earn back your advance, but you also have to pay for a lot of the publisher's overhead and marketing expenses and la, la, la, la, la.

Yes, yes, yes. The ad and the paper and the... That's right. Yeah.

Did you think that once you were done with that two-year obligation, you would just retire?

I was in my early 40s. Retire? What does that mean? My head was so in the moment that I really wasn't thinking what life would be like after the fact. And the second year was 2020. So my second year was three months in the office, and then I walked out of the office with everybody else in March and never came back. So I had actually planned a very intentional last year of how I would wind out and step back and pack up I've been off board, which never happened. And then I'm with everybody else in crazy COVID times, which is hard enough for everybody, let alone in this incredible career shift, identity shift What am I doing? What now? What's going on? There was so much change and shift that I was so personally intertwined with the brand that it was a personal identity. It was what I did. It was my life's work. It was my legacy. I knew that I needed to create space from that chapter before the next chapter. And sitting in nothingness for someone who's been on the move, it was really difficult.

Hold on to your wallet. Money Rehab will be right back. And now for some more money rehab. Within the Unilever universe, Ben and Jerry are trying to free their brand from Unilever. Jerry just quit, saying that Unilever is stifling their commitment to social justice. And in the acquisition process, they said that they would have autonomy, et cetera, et cetera. What advice would you give to Ben and Jerry?

They had such a different deal structure than I did, and they did have covenants for that. From what I understand, and I'm not an expert, but it seems as though Unilever is really breaching those terms that they had. At the same time, Unilever is spinning off the ice cream business. So they're like, We don't care. We're getting rid of this entire division anyway. And I don't know where that plays in, but if their deal wasn't transferable, I don't know. They had autonomy for a very, very, very long time, which is incredibly impressive. And Seventh Generation did, too. They had really built in structures in the deal of commitments to sustainability, commitments that they were able to get. The difference with Ben and Jerry is that they still and they're still around and still fighting. Whereas Seventh Generation, I was there when things were loosening up, and the stakeholders were finally leaving who did care, and the Unilever sheep were moving in. So That's the progression of what I witnessed.

Well, I really appreciate that you do not mince words about all of these issues with the acquisition. I think it's so refreshing and so sobering to so many people who might be starting businesses and think that this is the end-all be-all, the dream.

It's nice and sexy to market it that way, but it doesn't help anyone if everyone just believes that and isn't going in full awareness of scrappy startup is not so sexy. The other thing that's not sexy is when you overfund and you overraise and you have such low percentage that you would have been better off sticking in your corporate job financially after 13 years of killing yourself with a startup. That's not cool, but no one's sharing those stories.

Well, we try to share them or options, which I sometimes call magical beings. All of these things that you learn through the process that equity in a company sounds really sexy until that company raises money and the investors add pref, like preferred shares on top of it, and then nobody in common gets paid out. Yeah, exactly. We did an episode about this. It's one of our most popular because there's so little discussed about this idea of equity within a private company and how it could be dog shit.

Yeah. Nothing. I mean, nothing. So that's not sexy either. But it is important for me to share all my learnings and the reality and hopefully educate people so that they can be informed to make their own decisions that work for them and just understand the implications of taking money, understand the implications of exiting. I wish I knew more.

I mean, sometimes it can be amazing, but sometimes it's not.

Yeah. And I think that My advice is just be prepared for the worst case scenario.

Well, speaking of worst case scenario, so I told you I became a believer after meeting you. So I had all the Laundress products, I was obsessed, got the black and white iron board cover that I love so much. It burned in the fire recently, but it made ironing fun. I truly was all about it. Then I got an email, I think, that there was a recall in 2022, and I was like, What the heck? And I didn't know because you weren't talking about- Yeah, it was like, I never was officially excused.

So there was no nice handoff. It was trying to slithered into the...

The ether.

The slithered away.

So you weren't there. There was this massive recall.

Allegedly, some nasty stuff in there. I found out similar to you, my friend forward me an Instagram post.

That's crazy.

I was getting my hair done. I was like, What?

So thinking back, how did that make you feel? You never had an issue like that, obviously.

I mean, no. And that was I ran such a squeaky clean operation. Literally. Literally. There was never a complaint, never a return. I think there was literally one return where someone wanted to send back There were $45 La Labo detergent because they didn't like it, but the bottle happened to be empty when we got it back. So that was the extent of that complaint. And so No, nothing, nothing, nothing. Totally unconceivable that this was the situation. And this was completely self-induced by Unilever incompetence, period. They imploded themselves.

Do you get nervous talking about all this so openly?

No. It's the truth. I'm being honest, and it's the truth. And so I'm not I'm concerned about that.

Has anyone from the company reached out to you to mend fences or, on the flip side, come after you legally?

No, not yet.

Has anyone reached out to you about trying to buy back the company? No. Potentially. Would you ever do that?

No. And that was a classic dude response of, Oh, just buy it back for a dollar and do it all again. And I was like, I don't want their mess. I did it. I created the most beautiful baby. She was perfect, and I don't need to fix her. It's not my problem. I don't want someone else's mess.

Were there red flags in the contract that you would warn entrepreneurs about? You obviously had, I'm assuming, a non-competent, non-disparagement, all that stuff that's no longer in place.

Yes. It was a five-year non-competent, non-disparaging. The only thing I actually thought about or pushed back on was the five-year non-competent because they crossed it into personal care. And I just thought that was egregious. Not that I wanted to go make personal care, but it just seemed incredibly egregious. To add that with laundry. But at the time, I was like, The last thing I want to do is ever make a product again. So see you later. And then I didn't even really register on the non-dispareigen detail until after the recall, and I had to panic and pull all the contracts and make sure where I stood and what was going on and revisit all of that. And that's when I really understood the non-dispareigen agreement because I never thought it, mentally had that in my mind also to exercise. Deal-wise, whatever, fine. What I do wish that I understood and had in place, and this is something that I would recommend to other people in this process, is to have a very clear, agreed-upon plan of transition. And that was what we did not have, zero. And I had an employment contract that said, You just keep doing what you do.

And that was incredibly loose and vague. But there was no transition plan, zero. And that was the downside fall of many is that there was no proper transition plan or what that looked like or a person or a process. And now that I've spoken to other companies and other CPG, then they share their process and like, oh, we put one person in the organization. All these different really strategic, like normal processes that you would think of a giant CPG brand who had acquired a ton of brands previously would have a system, and they didn't. And that was my polyana assumption that, oh, they do this all the time. There has to be a very clear playbook. And there wasn't. And that was just so stupid in my assumption. But it is incredibly... That's my one thing I would say, understand exactly the playbook and who does what and how it happens and really button up that.

And any other protections or perks or rights that founders should be thinking about?

I mean, if you go down an earn-out path, that's a whole 'nother' situation of protecting yourself and really putting the guardrails on of how you can lose that. But again, just go in with worst case scenario. Not that. That will never happen. Every worst case scenario you could ever dream of If that's what you plan for. And have a good therapist ready for you.

Also so important. Try to put that in the contract.

Yeah. Get that ironed out right away. I was not prepared.

Hold on to your wallet.

Money Rehab will be right back.

And now for some more Money Rehab. When people were just DMing you about the recall, I know you couldn't respond, but once all of this expired, did you ever respond to the people who reached out to you?

I didn't. I had to wait a long time, and I'm actually not that savvy or involved in Instagram. I didn't. And it was very heartbreaking. This woman wrote me about she just washed all of her sweaters, and she was freaking out. And do I boil? And then it's like, you can't put in hot water. It was just like, it was so heartbreaking. I was like, your sweaters are fine. There is nothing wrong with your product. I couldn't say these things. I couldn't say there's no bacteria. There's nothing wrong with your product. You are fine. I couldn't say that. And I was like, the minute I open up one thing, I couldn't. So I just had to silently. They could have come after it. Yeah, I just had to silently.

So you decided to get back in the game.

Begrudgingly. Begrudgingly.

How did you come up with the idea for the fill?

It was circumstantial. Unilever implodes, self-destructs, pulls everything off the market, doesn't sell anything for nine months. Nine months, not a single product was sold, not even a laundry bag, not even your ironing board cover. And I knew I had a hunch what they were going to do. I waited to see what they did, and they did exactly what I expected them to do, which was relaunch the brand with a seventh-generation formula with my label on it, with some nod version to my fragrance because they banned... Unilever has their own rules that are not actually health and safety rules by the US government or the international standards. So the fragrance was completely stripped down to... I had a fine fragrance. It was a perfume. And then I dumbed it down to a Unilever style fragrance. They're so arrogant that they thought my customers were dumb and that they wouldn't notice that they were getting a seven-generation formula. And I was like, No, my customers are actually really savvy. They are not dumb. They're sophisticated. They're savvy. They see results and they understand the value, and you can't play that game. And so they came out with a dumb-dumb version.

And I had 85 products at the sale when I sold to Unilever, they came back with five-ish. And so I was like, Okay, here we go. I can't leave all of my customers hanging to dry. And I had customers that I relied on my products for 10, 15, almost 20 years. I was not going to leave my customers abandoned with the stuff that they could already be buying all along. I wasn't going to leave my customers hung out to dry. So I stepped back into the laundry room and it was fun to re-imagine and recreate this product category 20 years later with a different... I'm a different person. I have a different orientation. I have a different sense of what luxury is. The laundress was the luxury of fine fragrance, and now my luxury is aromatherapy, essential oils, getting results through aromatherapy while I'm cleaning that I'm doing anyways. That's where you get a sensory bonus with the fill. There is a lot of improvements and fun thing, fun upgrades in materials and formulations to play with at the same time. And then pushing sustainability to the next level, where I came out with PET, 100% recycled bottles in 2004, which was unheard of.

They were clear. It was concentrate, it was plant-based, all these things that were unheard of then. What does it look like now? Everything is in the refillable pouch with a reusable bottle that you can decant into and more saving on plastic. And doing the sustainability and package goods is not There's no perfect answer, but pushing the space to be better.

I'm just dying to know, would you ever sell?

No, this business is not made to sell. I would probably retire or hang up my hamper before I sold.

I know we've talked about this before, but an acquisition, of course, does not have to be an end-all be-all. It's a really, really important message for founders, especially profitable ones.

Profitable. And that's what it is. It's the greatest luxury, Nicole, as I'm sure you know, is to love what you do, have a purpose, work with amazing people, create jobs, positively create the economy. I was so proud that I had hundreds of factory workers employed because of my brand. Those are the wins. And selling, everyone just thinks you're going to go to the beach with a Pina colada, but you can't stop it. There's a satiation of creating and doing. And for me, I have a creative itch and I need to be doing something purposeful. And when you sell that and you lose that, it's very difficult. And it's like, wow, I loved what I did. I had all this amazing stuff. And I think that's the biggest thing that people don't really understand what they love about what they do or what they love about their businesses. And that's the best gift is to truly appreciate that. And you're profitable and growing and running a great business. That's the win.

I personally agree. For you, it sounds like the end all be all for your new venture is being profitable and being independent.

And just making beautiful product and being happy and doing it for fun and having fun with it and working with amazing people.

Well, sister, while you've been building this new venture, you have been going through a lot personally. To whatever extent you're comfortable talking about it on the show, you're one of 567, I think, patients sexually assaulted by an OB/GYN at Columbia. That's 567 patients who are involved in the settlement, but potentially there could be more, according to some reports.

There More and more because there was a settlement before mine.

Oh, wow.

So there was a first round. So, yeah, there are thousands of women that were affected by this doctor at Columbia.

Which, by the way, I didn't go to this doctor, but that was my OB/GYN when I was in New York, too. Completely shocking when I saw this. You have written that you didn't realize he was a predator until you saw a commercial.

What happened? Yeah. So I had the allegations and rumbling that he was a predator or a sexual offender. It was around 2013. And people would maybe recognize because Evelyn Wang, when Andrew Wang was running for President, briefly, she came out about she was in the actual criminal case. And that's when it became a high profile, a handful of women in the criminal case against him. And he essentially was acquitted by the same judge that acquitted Jeffrey Epstein. So if you Google Jeffrey Epstein and Dr. Haddon, you can get the facts on that detail. So I heard these rumblings of these other cases, but it wasn't until the TV commercial where this was now the class action for being a patient of Columbia and Dr. Haddon that was now available as the victim survivor's act that they opened up a few years ago. So that's where all of this case and this opportunity to come forward in the class action came up and why that happened. But if you read the essay that's in Marie Claire, you follow my journey of understanding... I'm a 49-year-old woman now. I started in my early 20s, and he was my first gynecologist, my first real doctor with my own insurance card at Columbia in New York.

We thought we were stars being taken care of like I had made it. And he had a protocol and a process that he had a routine that he followed with people who he could take advantage of because there was no point of reference. I didn't know any better. I didn't know what was supposed to be a proper exam and what wasn't. And so joining the class action and lifting the rug, or I should say, opening the filing cabinet after all these years and really processing and understanding what my reality was that I shoved in, literally in this filing cabinet, was a significant abuse.

I'm so sorry, Gwen. And your essay was so beautiful. You talk talk about this idea, too, that you want your story to be a catalyst to harness collective power among the women. So what is working with or talking to other survivors taught you about making your voice heard?

I had a small group of victims that I knew we all were the same doctor. And so we had a small group going through it together, which was incredible. I couldn't have done it without doing this alone. So I'm so grateful. This is also, like I said, this is a power of friendship and as much as a story of abuse. But just how I've been so adamant about sharing the realities of my business journey. And I feel like I have this platform I need to use my voice, and I'll cover any topic. And my ego doesn't prohibit me from doing these things. I am willing to self-sacrifice my privacy for the purpose. And this specific case is 100 % the power of numbers because I truly believe it was only the power of numbers of all these victims that we were able to get to this far of this class action. And when it was very early on with Evelyn Young and it was only a handful of victims, they were dismissed and pushed aside. But now it's so much bigger and powerful And I wrote that essay throughout the two years of going through the process and the aftermath.

The goal was to create a safe space to have shared conversations. And Whether it's people writing me privately and sharing or using this as a piece to open up dialog with people in their family or their friends or loved ones, or just being seen or heard or feel a shared sense, we need to leverage all of that power.

Thank you for doing that. You're amazing.

Thank you.

You're truly amazing. And thank you for being so open, honest, unfiltered and vulnerable. Gwen, as you know, we end all of our episodes by asking guests for a tip that listeners can take straight to the bank. But with everything that you've just opened up about, I would actually love to hear a tip for anybody who needs to do something good for their mental health while going through business this chaos? Is there something that you've done to protect your peace in the midst of all of these painful experiences?

I thought about this question, and to me, it's have a person. And I went through so much of the laundress alone, so much alone without a person. I didn't know anyone creating a business or struggling. And it's just things that I didn't feel comfortable sharing. But this A person doesn't have to always be the one person, or one person doesn't have to be the everybody person. So it's whether it's a person for the hard stuff, or a business person, or a relationship person, or the therapist, or whatever, just to have a person in whatever you're going through who's there for that topic to give you a safe space and not be alone.