Anybody who owns and operates greater than a number of cashmere sweaters knows about The Laundress. Since its launch in 2004 by two former fashion industry professionals, the road endeavored to raise the chore of washing clothes using specially formulated detergents with ingredient-conscious branding. The scents of the products alone — clean musks, herbaceous woods, Le Labo Santal 33 — turned first-time customers into lifetime users. When their flagship boutique first opened on Prince Street in Latest York City, it was a “showcase [of] how we have now transformed what was once an earthly domestic chore right into a true luxury experience,” cofounder Lindsey Boyd said. “The opportunities for us are limitless – in spite of everything, everyone has dirty laundry.” Over the subsequent decade-plus, it expanded into other domestic corridors, including general cleansing supplies and artisanal brooms made with horse hair.

As an organization, The Laundress is young. When it was purchased by Unilever in 2019 for a reported sum of $100 million, it became the youngest in its family of home-care brands, whose older siblings — Comfort, Domestos, Seventh Generation — have a median age of around 70 years. As a “brand” within the all-encompassingly industrial sense to which we have now all turn out to be accustomed, The Laundress is largely timeless, older than Instagram and Jenna Lyons’s J.Crew. Sneaker wedges got here and went, but upscale cleansing products proliferated right into a multimillion-dollar area of interest, one which is now crowded with names like Kris Jenner and Courteney Cox and Williams-Sonoma. The Laundress was the mother of all of it, the primary, and the perfect.

But in November of 2022, something gave the impression to be going very incorrect. On November 17, the brand posted a vague but alarming safety notice to their Instagram. It began like this: “This safety notice is to tell you to right away stop using all The Laundress products in your possession. We have now identified the potential presence of elevated levels of bacteria in a few of our products that present a security concern.”

The founding father of a competing cleansing brand recalls being on a plane when the news first dropped; by the point she disembarked, her phone had blown up. “My first thought was, The protection notice is weird,” she remembered. “My second thought was, How does this occur to Unilever?”