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Key Takeaways Maria Cabral Menezes, 27, worked in finance at Citadel and JPMorgan before deciding to create a “dry shampoo for clothes.”
The product arose out of necessity: Menezes frequently found herself with clothes she wore once that were too clean to wash but not fresh enough to wear with confidence.
The Reset Spray, which retails for $29, hit $10,000 in sales less than 36 hours after its debut in early August.
Maria Cabral Menezes, 27, never set out to be an entrepreneur — let alone one behind a product that achieved $10,000 in sales in less than 36 hours.
Menezes moved to the U.S. from Brazil to study at the University of Pennsylvania, where she majored in behavioral economics, retailing and international development. After graduating in 2021, she joined JPMorgan Chase as a global equities trader, then moved to Citadel as a trader after a year.
“I came to the U.S. to go down the most typical finance path ever,” Menezes tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. “I was not meant to be an entrepreneur, at least I didn’t think I was.”
As a trader, Menezes encountered a pain point. When she traveled for conferences, she would try to rewear the same blazer two or three days in a row and not feel very confident that it was clean enough. She would also go to the gym in the morning and travel around for the rest of the day with sweaty clothes stuffed into a duffel bag.
Then there was the chair. Menezes would tell her friends about the chair she had at home, piled up with clothes she had worn once. The clothes were too clean to wash, but not fresh enough to rewear and feel confident. She would end up paying to dry clean them.
“I remember thinking, I wish there was something like a dry shampoo, but for your clothes,” Menezes says. “A spray that allows you to re-wear an item between washes so that you’re not constantly over-washing your clothes or over dry cleaning, which is not good for the actual clothing itself if you lightly wore it.”
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