The Company Files · Consumer Marketplace
The company that turned laundry into a tap.
Poplin is the app that sends a vetted neighbor to your door, takes your dirty clothes, and returns them clean and folded. No quarters. No 11pm dread.
Poplin is the app that sends a vetted neighbor to your door, takes your dirty clothes, and returns them clean and folded. No quarters. No 11pm dread.
Every week, Americans wash roughly 100 billion pounds of laundry - badly, resentfully, at the worst possible hour. Poplin noticed.
Picture the corner of any bedroom in America. A basket that never empties. A machine that beeps and gets ignored. Somebody swears they'll get to it Sunday, and somebody is lying. This is the market Poplin walked into - not a gap in technology, but a gap in willpower.
What Poplin sells looks like clean clothes. What it actually sells is the disappearance of that pile. You open an app, a background-checked local Laundry Pro drives over, collects the basket, washes and folds it in their own home, and brings it back - usually within 24 hours. The price is about a dollar a pound. Pickup and delivery are free.
The company was not born in a garage or a graduate program. It was born in a laundry room in Baltimore, where Ari Fertel was folding for a household of five children who would not lift a finger to help. So in 2017 she did what exhausted parents rarely get to do - she made the problem someone else's. She dared her sons to build an app that would let her outsource the whole affair.
Nachshon Fertel, then a high-school sophomore, wrote the code - and earned science credit for it. His father, Mort Fertel, became CEO. His triplet brother Moshe took operations. The result, launched in 2018 as SudShare, was a two-sided marketplace: people who hated laundry on one side, people willing to do it for money on the other.
The insight was almost embarrassingly simple. Millions of people already own washers and dryers that sit idle most of the day. Millions more would happily pay to never touch a fitted sheet again. Poplin's job was just to be the trust and the software between them - and to skip the laundromats entirely.
Open the app, tell Poplin when to grab your laundry. Same-day windows in most cities.
A vetted, background-checked local Laundry Pro collects the bag from your door - free.
They wash, dry, and fold with your preferences in mind - in their own home, not a factory.
Clean, folded, and back at your door, typically within 24 hours. Rate your Pro and repeat.
Here is the trick that let Poplin scale where "Uber for laundry" ideas kept dying: it owns almost nothing. No storefronts, no industrial machines, no leases. Every load is washed in a Laundry Pro's own home. The company is asset-light in the extreme - its real inventory is trust, coordinated by an app.
Laundry Pros keep about 75% of each order, plus tips, and set their own hours. For a parent at home, a retiree, or anyone who wants to earn without commuting, it's a job that fits between school runs. Poplin takes a platform cut and, crucially, renamed the workers from "Sudsters" to Laundry Pros in its 2023 rebrand - a small word change that reframed a gag as a craft.
The customer side. Schedule pickup, set preferences, choose a favorite Pro for repeat orders, and get folded laundry back in about a day for ~$1/lb.
The earner side. Accept nearby orders, follow in-app training, and turn a home washer and dryer into income - roughly 75% per order plus tips.
Wash-and-fold, linen, and uniform service for hotels, gyms, and salons that don't want to run their own laundry operation.
Care standards and coverage designed to answer the one nagging question every new customer has: what if something happens to my clothes?
Teenager Nachshon Fertel codes the first app for science credit, after his mother challenges him to make laundry someone else's problem.
The Fertel family opens the marketplace in Baltimore, initially doing loads themselves before recruiting contractors.
Demand for contactless, at-home services pushes SudShare past 400 US cities.
Headline leads a $10M seed investment, with Starting Line participating.
SudShare rebrands to Poplin; "Sudsters" are promoted, in name and framing, to "Laundry Pros."
Poplin launches in Toronto - its first market outside the United States.
Poplin's top three seats - CEO, CTO, COO - are held by one dad and his triplet sons. That family fingerprint shows up in how the company talks about work: laundry as a skilled trade, Pros as professionals, and flexibility as the whole point. Its Giving Cycle program donates free laundry service to people in need, using the same network that powers the paid side.
The marketing has a wink to it. In 2025 the company ran a national contest to hire a "Chief Freedom Officer" - $10,000 and a year of free laundry to whoever best explained what they'd do with the time back. It's a tell: Poplin isn't really selling clean clothes. It's selling Saturdays.
The founding CTO wrote the first version as a high-school sophomore - and got graded for it.
The C-suite is one father and his triplet sons: CEO, CTO, and COO.
Poplin runs North America's largest laundry network and owns exactly zero laundromats.
Workers were once "Sudsters." The rebrand promoted them to "Laundry Pros."
Poplin markets itself as being in the business of time, not detergent.
30,000+ five-star reviews across 8,000+ zip codes and 48 states.
Watch how the service works, then find Poplin across the web.
Back in that bedroom corner, the basket is empty. Not because someone finally caved on a Sunday - but because someone else, a few blocks over, folded it warm and brought it back. The pile, for once, lost.