![]() ![]() ![]() Lines to get into the Wing’s spaces stretched around the block. Members paid as much as $2,700 annually to access the co-working space and join the Wing’s exclusive club. They featured workspaces, showers, full restaurants, even a daycare-all of it luxurious and ultracomfortable, all of it in hues of pink. Inside, the spaces looked like a young feminist’s dream come true. Its second location, in SoHo, opened a year later. The Wing’s first location opened in Manhattan’s Flatiron District in October 2016. The two divided business responsibilities-Kassan became chief operating officer, running the company day-to-day, and Gelman assumed the role of CEO, handling brand and creative. Kassan joined Gelman as a founder and suggested expanding the Wing into a co-working space. In 2015, Gelman connected with angel investor Alex Kassan, who declined to back the Wing but introduced Gelman to his wife Lauren, then-director of business development for ClassPass. So I made a bet on her.” (Aside from O’Donnell, investors in the Wing declined or did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.) “I got serious thumbs up all the way around. She’s a force,’” says Charlie O’Donnell, founder and general partner of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures and a seed investor in the Wing. ![]() “Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, if you have the opportunity to back her, you should. Investors were drawn to Gelman’s woman-focused concept-and to Gelman herself. Why can’t we come up with a solution to this?” Gelman told Forbes in November 2016.īy the end of 2015, Gelman had raised over $2.5 million in seed funding supported by seven investors, including Serena Williams’s Serena Ventures. Gelman dreamed up a business that offered on-the-go women a place to freshen up between appointments. The idea for the Wing dawned on Audrey Gelman, then senior vice president of public relations at public affairs and political consulting firm SKDK, in 2015 as she changed clothes in a Starbucks bathroom. This account builds on past reporting by Fortune and others for this account, Fortune contacted the founders, investors, and former executives and spoke with six former employees of the Wing and three former members of the co-working space. But it also failed because the Wing seemed more devoted to expansion and its picture-perfect public image than building a workspace-and workplace-that lived up to its original mission. Gelman declined to comment for this story Kassan did not respond to requests for comment.ĭespite attempts to make up for past missteps, the Wing’s comeback collided with the tough economics of a shared office space market remade by the pandemic’s remote work revolution. A larger co-working company eventually bought a majority stake in the startup under new ownership, the Wing staged an ambitious reopening of six locations in 2021 that lasted just months. COVID forced the Wing to shut its locations and shed staff. Gelman’s exit in June 2020 kicked off a round of CEO musical chairs. Hourly employees, most of whom were Black or Brown women, went public with reports of mistreatment that contradicted the Wing’s uplifting, empowering brand. Members and staff criticized management for mishandling an allegedly racist incident. A 2019 lawsuit forced the Wing to drop its ban on membership by men, who were previously only allowed to visit as guests. Members were sold on the sisterhood of professionals, freelancers, and creative types the Wing had cultivated, its plush amenities, and its Instagrammable, millennial-pink interior that visitors likened to a womb.īut scandal chipped away at the Wing’s polished veneer. The space drew visits from the likes of Hillary Clinton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jennifer Lopez, and had a wait list tens of thousands of people long. The email represented the culmination of the epic rise and tumultuous fall of a business built around what its founders once billed as a “women’s utopia.” Founded by Audrey Gelman and Lauren Kassan in 2016, the Wing saw its valuation peak at $365 million as investors like WeWork’s Adam Neumann, Sequoia Capital’s Jess Lee, and even soccer player Alex Morgan flocked to the mission of empowering women through community. It had reopened six locations after COVID, but the “operating environment” had proved “extremely challenging,” the company said in an email to members. More than two years later, in August 2022, the Wing announced it was shutting down for good. In the end, neither statement was fully realized.
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