How Nachshon Fertel spun his mother's laundry woes into a bubbling business 

Photos: Leslie Parker, Family archives

There are a few phrases every mother dreads hearing in the morning rush, such as, “I’m Shabbos Mommy today and I’m supposed to bring nosh for my whole class,” or “I forgot to tell you I need $16.75 in exact change for my school trip today.”But perhaps the most common one goes something like this: “MAAAA! I don’t have any clean socks! MAAAA! I don’t have a white shirt! MAAAA! How come all my uniform skirts are in the wash?”

Laundry is as inevitable as death and taxes, especially for large families. And that’s why about five years ago, Mrs. Ari Fertel, a mother of five from Baltimore, looked at her children in exasperation and said, “I don’t get it. There’s an app to get a taxi. There’s an app to buy a plane ticket to go across the world. Why are we still doing laundry like we did when washing machines came on the scene in the 1950s? Can’t someone make an app for that too?”

Her son Nachshon, then a 16-year-old computer whiz, did what few teenagers his age would have done: He actually paid attention. He said, “Ma, I think I can solve that.”

”We thought he was kidding,” says his father, Mort Fertel, a serial entrepreneur and relationship guru who years back created his internationally-acclaimed Marriage Fitness “boot camp.” But Nachshon saw the potential to build an app for laundry like Uber did for the ride service business. There were two things propelling Nachshon’s interest: First, he’d always been a bit of a techie. And second, he had started attending yeshivah out of town, and he didn’t like doing laundry either.

True to his Biblical namesake, Nachshon Fertel rose to the challenge and plunged into the churning, soapy waters of America’s laundry woes, prepared to lead people out of their servitude to spin cycles and dryer sheets, and on to the Promised Land of cheaply outsourced laundry service. And none too soon, with the collaboration of his father, the SudShare app launched. Just tap the app, and somebody will appear at your house, collect your dirty clothing, and return it within 24 hours washed and folded.

It seems Mrs. Fertel had her finger on the pulse of the nation when she wished aloud for a laundry app. The SudShare app lost no time starting to froth, and as of this writing, SudShare services hundreds of thousands of people in 400 cities, with a full-time executive team of 24 in addition to 70,000 part-time “Sudsters” (those who pick up and process laundry). Revenues are now reaching into the millions of dollars.

“I think Covid taught us that time is precious, and we’d rather spend it doing things that are meaningful than chores like laundry,” Mort Fertel says. “We outsource mowing the lawn, we outsource scrubbing the bathroom — why not outsource laundry?”

It’s a win-win all around, as many of the tens of thousands of Sudsters around the country are people who had been left out of the workforce until they too joined this work-from-home opportunity.

Part of what makes this business story special is that Nachshon is the third in a set of triplets, with his siblings now on board together with him. Moshe Fertel serves as the director of operations, and sister Shira helps with bookkeeping in addition to her job working with autistic children. (The other two siblings haven’t gotten involved, at least not yet; Zachariah, the oldest, is married and working in real estate, and Nesya, at age 13, is a serious violinist devoted full-time to her calling.) Mort runs the business end of SudShare full-time, and mom Ari continues to contribute her ideas and consumer expertise. As her kids note, “She doesn’t really do anything in the business, but on the other hand, everything happens because of her.”