‘Your back’s against the wall’: How two Gen-Z founders bet everything on a Brooklyn laundromat
· Fortune
At Christmas dinner in 2023, 25-year-old Ireland McCaughey listened as her family talked about friends preparing to retire and the businesses they were leaving behind. Their children weren’t interested in taking over the family car washes, laundromats or parking lots. But across the room, McCaughey and her business partner, Ben Razin, saw opportunity in the kinds of “boring businesses” most people their age ignored.
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“We realized there was a really huge gap where people our age were kind of overlooking the more traditional industries,” McCaughey told Fortune. “A lot of the people that own them are kind of aging out and looking to sell them.”
“When Ireland and I came in, we were these young 25-, 27-year-olds coming to the laundry industry, and we just kind of wanted to reimagine what it could be to be a laundry service and a laundromat,” Razin said.
What investor and entrepreneur Codie Sanchez has popularized as “boring businesses” has become one of entrepreneurship’s hottest conversations. But for McCaughey and Razin, the appeal wasn’t simply buying an old business. It was proving that one of Main Street’s oldest industries could be reimagined.
Within months, McCaughey and Razin had gone from talking about laundromats over Christmas dinner to pitching investors and lenders, taking on real debt and packing up their lives in Orange County and moving to New York. They signed a lease on July 1, 2024, with six months of free rent to build the business before payments kicked in, leaving little room for mistakes.
They caught one lucky break. The space already had the gas, water and electrical capacity needed to operate a laundromat, sparing them the months-long permitting process that can derail businesses before they even open.
Then the countdown began. Every day they weren’t open was another day closer to January, when the free rent ended and the bills would start coming due.
“Your back’s against the wall, so you have no choice,” Razin said.
Bringing startup thinking to Main Street
To Razin, laundromats had one advantage other “boring businesses” didn’t.
“Laundromats have historically been this thing where, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it,” he told Fortune. “Once you have a customer, it’s very difficult to lose them. You have to really do something bad to lose them.”
For decades, many Main Street businesses competed on convenience because they had little reason to compete on anything else. McCaughey and Razin wondered what would happen if they competed on experience instead.
Their answer was Launderette, a Brooklyn laundromat designed to feel more like a neighborhood café than a traditional wash-and-fold. Rather than filling every square foot with washing machines, the pair intentionally carved out space for communal seating, work tables and customers who might linger long after their laundry was done.
It was exactly the kind of decision traditional laundromat operators had warned them against.
“They said, ‘Absolutely don’t do this,'” McCaughey said of advisers who questioned giving up valuable floor space to create an area where customers could work and hang out. “They just didn’t really understand the impact that a brand has on younger generations and really see the vision.”
The bet reflects a broader shift happening across Main Street. Businesses that once competed almost exclusively on convenience are increasingly competing on brand.
California gas station Maggie’s markets itself around “gas, lattes and little treats,” while New York City-based moving company Piece of Cake has built recognizable branding around what was once a purely transactional service.
The strategy has already opened doors beyond neighborhood customers. Hotels and Pilates studios have become commercial clients, while brands including Brooklinen and Tower 28 have rented Launderette for events, turning the space into more than just a place to do laundry.
The promise vs. the reality
Not everyone is convinced the online fascination with “boring businesses” reflects what’s actually happening in the market.
Scott Shane, a professor of entrepreneurial studies at Case Western Reserve University, told Fortune the popularity of “boring businesses” has far outpaced the number of actual deals.
Americans filed 5.62 million new business applications in 2025, representing an increase of about 8% from the previous year and among the highest totals ever recorded. Meanwhile, BizBuySell, the largest business-for-sale marketplace, recorded fewer than 10,000 completed business sales in 2025, with transaction volume declining further in early 2026, according to Shane.
“Watching videos about buying a laundromat and buying a laundromat are very different activities,” Shane told Fortune. “The gap between stated intent and closed transactions is enormous, and it’s where the hype lives.”
Codie Sanchez, entrepreneur and author of the forthcoming book Own or Be Owned, sees the movement through a different lens. In the book, she argues that the biggest opportunities aren’t always in building something new, but in improving businesses that already generate customers and cash flow.
“Five years ago, the narrative was: build the next unicorn,” she told Fortune. “Venture capital owned that story. But that math doesn’t work for most people.”
Instead, Sanchez argues entrepreneurs are realizing they don’t need to invent the next billion-dollar company. Existing businesses already have customers, recurring revenue and cash flow. What changed, she said, wasn’t the opportunity itself but people’s awareness of it.
“The internet got tired of the same story,” she said.
For Sanchez, the appeal isn’t the businesses themselves. “A boring business teaches you that lesson faster than any startup ever could,” Sanchez told Fortune.
In McCaughey and Razin’s experience, building Launderette looked less like passive income and more like the messy reality of entrepreneurship: pitching investors, taking on real debt, racing to open before the free rent ran out and learning to pivot along the way.
Today, the pair are weighing what’s next. They could open another Launderette, build a warehouse to expand their commercial laundry business or eventually compete with New York City’s largest pickup-and-delivery services.
“We just need to take it step by step and keep growing the company in the right way,” Razin said.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com