Mort Fertel

What makes Fertel worth a second look is not the marketplace mechanics. It is the resume. Before laundry, he spent two decades as a globally known relationship expert - the creator of Marriage Fitness, a program used by people in marital crisis around the world, and the subject of a documentary.

Most founders pivot from one tech idea to the next. Fertel pivoted from saving marriages to saving Saturdays. In 2026, Poplin crossed the border and launched in Toronto. He once taught couples how to stop fighting; now he teaches households how to stop folding.

There is a tidy logic to it. The two businesses rhyme. Each one asks a customer to hand over something intimate - a marriage on the rocks, or a week's worth of dirty clothes - and trust a stranger to treat it with care. Fertel has spent his whole working life in that uncomfortable space where private problems meet public help, and he seems to like it there.

It is 2017. Ari Fertel is home with five children and a mountain of laundry that never shrinks. She does the math on modern life out loud: the phone in her pocket can summon a car or a face across the planet, but the clothes still pile up the way they did a hundred years ago. She is annoyed, and she says so.

The kids did not offer to help fold. They offered something stranger. Nachshon Fertel, then a sophomore at a yeshiva in Norfolk, Virginia, built an app - and earned science credit for it. The family did the first orders themselves before recruiting outsiders. A complaint became a chore-share. A chore-share became a marketplace.

By 2018 the thing had a name, SudShare, and a headquarters in Baltimore. By 2021 it covered 400-plus cities. In 2022 it raised $10 million from Silicon Valley and rebranded as Poplin.

The org chart reads like a Thanksgiving table. Mort is CEO. His triplet son Nachshon is CTO. His triplet son Moshe is COO. The company that started because the kids would not help with the laundry is now run by the kids, on the laundry.

Fertel sizes the prize at roughly $300 billion: 125 million American households, 50 pounds of laundry a week, and small businesses as the fastest-growing slice of demand.

Strip away the branding and Poplin is a classic two-sided marketplace, the kind investors love and operators lose sleep over. On one side sits the customer who would rather do almost anything than fold a fitted sheet. On the other sits the Laundry Pro - someone with a washer, some spare hours, and a reason to want extra income.

Fertel's daily problem is balance. Too many customers and not enough Pros, orders go cold. Too many Pros and not enough orders, the workers leave. Keeping both sides full at once, in 500-plus separate local markets, is the actual job. The app is just the handshake in the middle.

The economics are deliberately lopsided in the worker's favor. Pros keep roughly three-quarters of every order plus tips; Poplin takes the rest. That is how Fertel frames the company less as a tech disruptor and more as an income engine - a gig that fits around a life rather than replacing one.

The growth numbers tell their own story. SudShare reached more than 400 cities by 2021. The 2022 seed round of $10 million, from Silicon Valley investors, funded the rebrand to Poplin and the push toward national density. By 2026 the footprint covered 8,000 zip codes across 48 states, with small businesses - restaurants, salons, short-term rentals - emerging as the fastest-growing customers.

Fertel keeps the long view in his back pocket as a single, enormous figure: a $300 billion American laundry market, built from 125 million households each generating around 50 pounds of wash a week. Most of that money never changes hands today, because most people still do it themselves. Poplin's bet is that they would rather not.

The 2026 Toronto launch is the first chapter outside the United States - a quiet signal that "a life without laundry" is meant to travel.