Maria Cabral Menezes27, never set out to become an entrepreneur – let alone create a product that achieved $10,000 in sales in less than 36 hours.

Menezes moved from Brazil to America to study University of PennsylvaniaWhere he specialized in behavioral economics, retailing and international development. After graduation in 2021, she joined JPMorgan Chase As a global equities trader, then went citadel After one year as a businessman.

“I came to America to follow the most specific financial path I have ever taken,” Menezes explains. entrepreneur In a new interview. "I wasn't meant to be an entrepreneur, at least I didn't think I was."

As a businessman, Menezes faced a difficult problem. She tried to wear it again when she traveled to conferences. blazer Two or three days in a row and I wasn't quite sure it was clean enough. She also went to the gym in the morning and walked around carrying her sweaty clothes in a duffel bag for the rest of the day.

Then there was the chair. Menezes would tell her friends about a chair in her house that held clothes she had once worn. The clothes were clean enough to wash, but not fresh enough to feel confident wearing again. Ultimately he will have to pay to have them dry cleaned.

"I remember thinking, I wish there was something like this dry shampoobut for your clothesMenezes says. "A spray that allows you to re-wear an item between washes so you're not constantly over-washing your clothes or taking them to dry cleaning, which is not good for actual clothes if you've worn them lightly."

create a new product

Menezes began researching the market. He found that laundry companies mainly focus on detergent. They didn't consider that 99% of the time the clothes were nowhere near the washing machine.

She was the inspiration for Menezes' brand, WashWise, and its hero product, reset spray. The $29 product markets itself as "dry clean in a bottle" and "dry shampoo for clothes." It reduces wrinkles in clothes, cleans and neutralizes odors in a way that is safe for skin and clothes. The spray comes in two scents and two sizes, including a travel option. Menezes launched the product last month.

"My goal is that when you take out a piece of clothing, you think, Is it dirty? Is it clear?“And if it's in the middle, we're washing it,” says Menezes.

Although the reset was made with spray sustainability With that in mind, WashWise positions it as a time-saving product. It's selling convenience to consumers who travel, workout, wear synthetic clothes or simply don't want to carry a load of laundry after every light wash.

“We're basically giving people back time,” she says.

Menezes believes that framing helps the product reach multiple audiences. The phrase "dry shampoo for clothes" may immediately register with women who already use dry shampoo, but the use cases extend beyond that customer base, she says.

"It's not just women who understand 'dry shampoo for clothes,'" she says. “This is also wall street brother The one who sometimes gets wrinkles on his face between meetings, or the college kid who is disorganized and doesn't wash as many clothes as he should."

Menezes says the brand's consumer Research found that one bottle of the product could replace $300 in dry-cleaning costs, six hours of laundry time, and 110 gallons of water, although these results would depend on the individual consumer's habits.

How did he develop the spray?

Menezes first began developing the product by examining what washing machine Does for clothes so he can copy it in spray format. she was still working citadel Last year when she came in contact with a chemist through LinkedIn.

“I rejected his idea, and we actually started putting together all these formulations at home in our living room,” says Menezes. “Eventually we came up with a formulation that we were so confident about that we were ready to talk to contract manufacturers.”

Menezes estimates that the internal process involved 10 to 15 iterations. after all productive Two minor improvements were made, focusing more on product protection and scale than on the main function of the formula.

“By the time we went to them, we already had something that was proven in-house,” she says.

Covered the entire path from meeting the chemist to the first round of production more than one year. This was not a straightforward process. Menezes initially explored a different idea: a water-soluble bag for sweaty workout clothes that would dissolve in the wash and contain odor neutralizing agents.

Then he identified a obvious defects.

"When something is sweaty, it melts the bag before it even gets to your house," she says. "It was just such a mistake."

It introduced that product, though Menezes says WashWise may eventually offer another solution specifically for handling sweaty clothes Unless it can be washed off.

A financial mindset that applies to consumer products

The spray also presented a complex formulation challenge. Menezes says that many ingredients used to neutralize odors can interfere with fragrance, while other ingredients may work against wrinkle-reducing or cleaning performance.

“The hardest part was finding ways in which we were learning enough about these materials to find novel materials that worked symbiotically,” she says.

Menezes left citadel Once they were confident that the product had strength and could be manufactured. He worked at Washwise for a while alongside his full-time job, but he says the intensity of the finance career made it true lateral movement Unreal.

“The moment I went through all those tests and I knew it was possible, that's when I decided to leave,” she says, who has worked full-time at Washwise since June last year.

Menezes says he invested between $50,000 and $70,000 of his own savings before raising external funding. washable Raised $1.2 million in August from investors including Hims & Hers co-founder Jack Abraham, Oats Overnight founder Brian Tate, Sense founder Alex Jankowski, and FJ Labs.

Menezes has not paid himself in over a year, choosing instead to invest resources in recruiting and client acquisition.

“I look at the value of every dollar I put in,” she says. “I'd love to put every dollar into something that has a huge multiplier effect.”

His finance background He has shaped the way the company operates. Menezes says his primary goal with Citadel is to emphasize process: questioning why each task is done, whether it can be improved, and how it might work at scale.

"To survive in a place like citadelYour process needs to be bulletproof,'' she says. “It's not like, 'We do this just because we do this.'

Difference between startup life and finance

The move from public-market investing to private-company creation forced Menezes to get comfortable with uncertainty. In finance, she could measure results quickly and accurately. The market performance is as follows investment decision. It is less easy to evaluate startup options, including hiring decisions, brand strategy, and long-term partnerships.

“It's taught me to be a lot more intuitive,” she says. “There's less quantitative stuff to understand.”

For Menezes, disciplined process And the intuitions are not opposites. She says that thoroughly examining routine decisions makes her better prepared when an unexpected decision requires speed and judgment.

"The moment something suddenly comes in front of me and I have to make a decision on the fly, I feel like I'm the best prepared version of myself to make that decision," she says. “I feel great confident In trusting myself.”

Demand for building before checkout opens

It's been more than a year since WashWise launched in early August, but its initial sales surge was largely dependent on building an audience in the months leading up to launch.

Rather than wait for the reveal of a refined product, Menezes Documented the company's growth On TikTok and Instagram. She posted packaging options, new boxes, formulation updates and questions for potential customers. Their audience was relatively small, around 3,000 followers. Instagram and at about 600 tiktok At the time of this interview. However, followers were highly engaged.

“Whenever we needed advice, we would always go to social media and ask for it,” she says.

That approach gave early followers a sense of ownership. By the time WashWise launched, product Didn't come as a surprise.

"If you've been my friend and you've followed me, you probably know as much about WashWise as I do, because I've really tried to share it all," says Menezes.

he also made one tiktok series It's called "Deglamorizing Founder Life", in which she candidly discusses failures and tough days. The post gave them a way to build a founder-led brand without turning entrepreneurship into a flashy highlight reel.

"It's really, really hard to create," she says. "So that's one thing I'm doing. Whenever I'm having a hard day, and it's hard to create, I share it because I think that's important too."

a strategy that worked

That transparency went against some conventional public relations advice. Menezes says his members PR team There are concerns that the building being too visible will remove an element of surprise from the final launch. He saw it differently.

“I feel like, no, I want people to do view trip Because that means once we start ordering, there's already a lot of demand,'' she says.

The strategy appears to have worked. Menezes says Washwise created "A" Really, really big list The number of people who were ready to purchase before launch.

More importantly, customers already understand the terminology. The company used phrases such as "chair robe", a reference to a chair filled with clothes once worn, and "dry shampoo For clothes" were used so frequently that they became shorthand for the problem Washwise was trying to solve.

“We actually had words that didn't exist as part of new habit We're trying to create," she says.

Sales of Reset Spray reached $10,000 in less than two days after its launch on August 10. Menezes says her goal is to make WashWise a household name and change people's habits with the Reset Spray and other products she is currently developing.

She says, "Let's do it this one time; let's do it really well." “Let's put all our marketing and all our focus on this one product, and then do it again and keep iterating.”

He said the approach was the same as dyson Does: Think outside the box, develop a product, really master it, then move on.

“We are giving it the time it needs to establish itself as innovators in the laundry space before moving on to the next laundry space,” she says.