2 days ago
Audrey Gelman's World Isn't Millennial Pink Anymore
The easily digestible story is that Audrey Gelman resigned as chief executive of the Wing in 2020, withdrew to the Hudson Valley of New York, and took refuge in nostalgia.
She licked her wounds, reflecting on the accusations of inequity and racism at the company she co-founded. The Wing was a chain of co-working and events spaces for women that captured national attention, expanding from one location to 11 in three years. But it also polarized the millennial cohort it sought to recruit, and when it fell short of its feminist 'utopia' promise, Ms. Gelman was ousted.
In country kitsch, Ms. Gelman found comfort, then purpose. She returned to Brooklyn, where she still owned a home with her husband, a start-up president turned psychoanalyst, and opened a small store called the Six Bells in 2022. She sold antiques and handmade goods meant to conjure a slow, bucolic life: taper candles, spongeware vases, frill pillows mismatched to perfection.
To Ms. Gelman, the store felt safe, like a 'cozy sort of womb,' she said. The entrepreneur whose brainchild had once attracted a $365 million valuation — who had named a conference room in San Francisco after Christine Blasey Ford and a phone booth in Washington after Shirley Chisholm — was now content collecting woven Longaberger baskets and dreaming up fictional English villagers to inspire the shop.
But this story is not quite right. It assumes that when Ms. Gelman relinquished control of the Wing, she yielded some of her ambition, too; that the 'girlbosses' were going 'tradwife'; that her desire to build big businesses dried up when she pivoted to chintz and craft.
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