WashWise raises $1.2M to reinvent laundry

WashWise has raised $1.2 million in pre-seed financing and launched its debut product, Reset Spray. Founder Maria Cabral Menezes, who spent her prior career trading at J.P. Morgan and Citadel, built the product for the wardrobe she was living in: early workouts, constant travel, and dry-cleaning bills that never stopped.

Reset Spray works like a dry shampoo for clothes, made to refresh fabric, neutralize odors, reduce wrinkles and lightly cleanse garments between wears. It sells direct-to-consumer at $29 for a 6-ounce bottle in two scents. The round’s backers include FJ Labs, Singh Capital, Jack Abraham, and Alex Jekowsky, the chief executive of laundry-technology company Cents, alongside angels from Dior, SoulCycle and Soho House.

Why it matters

Household care is one of the harder CPG categories to enter. Shelf space is controlled by a handful of incumbents with decades of brand equity and the trade spend to defend it. New entrants that succeed usually do so by defining a use case the incumbents do not serve, rather than competing head-on for the detergent buyer.

“Between washes” is exactly that kind of wedge. The company’s founding stat is that clothing spends roughly 99% of its life outside the washing machine, and nothing on the laundry shelf addresses that time. The wedge does not ask the shopper to switch detergent, and it creates a repeat-purchase occasion that did not previously exist.

What to watch

Where the brand goes after direct-to-consumer. A pre-seed of this size funds inventory and proof of repeat purchase, not a national retail push. The tell will be whether the between-wash behavior sticks well enough to earn a specialty retail or beauty-adjacent placement, where a $29 spray reads as self-care rather than as an expensive laundry product.

Originally reported on Instagram: see the post