Meet The Laundress Co-Creator Lindsey Boyd — How Her Company Changed Laundry and Home Cleaning

The Laundress has a collection of eco-friendly laundry, fabric, and home care products

Lindsey Boyd and Gwen Whiting are on a crusade to eliminate the need for dry-cleaning, and they want to use eco-friendly products to do it.

Boyd took inspiration for the company when one of her jackets that was coated in pearls got ruined at the dry cleaner.

“I brought this jacket in perfect form to the dry cleaner, went to go pick it up a week later and … I’m not kidding, the pearls were missing,” Boyd tells PEOPLE. “It had gaps in the jacket where there was nothing there. The entire jacket was originally covered. The dry cleaner said, ‘I’m sorry, there’s nothing we can do about it. You’ll have to contact the manufacturer.'”

So she had an idea to team up with Whiting, one of her former classmates from Cornell University, to create a collection of products that would drastically change the landscape of fabric, detergent, and home care products that are eco-friendly. At the time, the pair had both been working fashion jobs — Boyd at Chanel and Whiting at Ralph Lauren — and they used their expertise from that industry to launch The Laundress.

“No one has a good dry cleaning story, really. Or I should say everyone has a bad dry cleaning story?” Boyd says. “Really, just taking our education, married with our professional careers in fashion and a personal need that we had, that’s how the idea started.”

After striking up initial concepts, Boyd and Whiting began searching for a way to create products that best served their eco-friendly goal.

“We set out to find the best products with the best ingredients,” Boyd says. So they searched for components that would provide a high concentration and allow their customers to preserve fabrics such as cashmere and silk.

“We were trying to eliminate — as much as possible — dry cleaners out of your life,” she continues.

They began with 13 products, but have now expanded to over 70 different varieties, including home cleaning sprays, laundry detergents, and hampers and storage bags.

Alongside their expansion in product development, the brand has also garnered a lot of social media attention, racking up 50 thousand followers on Instagram. The business owners have also enlisted the help of several celebrities to be the face of their new campaign called “Our Beautiful Messes,” including fashion icon Iris Apfel, Lucy Liu, Padma Lakshmi, and Oliver Hudson.

“We went about each person to be specific to a certain target market,” Boyd says. “We have a lot of customers that love cooking, so Padma was an obvious choice for that. We have a very international clientele in Asia, so Lucy Liu. Iris Apfel — Gwen and I have a long-time affinity for her. She’s very iconic in fashion and really fun and quirky and we thought that she would be a great fit for being able to express certain fashion pieces within our collection.”

Along with posting on Instagram about the product, the celebrities have also taken part in videos on The Laundress YouTube channel, including one that depicts Hudson using The Laundress Surface Cleaner to clean the mess his children left.

“Okay, yeah, this is great,” Hudson sarcastically says in the video before cleaning the aftermath of his children’s play time.

The video also features a cameo from Alan Cumming, who exclaims, “nailed it,” after Hudson’s successful use of the Surface Cleaner.

With this celebrity assistance, The Laundress has continued to excel in their products, but the overall goal remains the same: Create the best material that has drastically changed the products of fabric, detergent, and home care.

“So we educate people on care for their things, and it’s just better for that,” Boyd said. “Not just better for the clothing, but it’s better for them, it’s better for the environment.”