Long before she ever came up with the idea for Wad-Free, Cyndi Bray was an avid fan of ABC’s "Shark Tank" and felt like she learned key entrepreneurial lessons from the cast of famed investors.
“I felt all along as though I’d been mentored by the sharks even before I came up with the product,” she said.
So, when the Denver resident was selected to appear on Friday's show with her anti-wadding laundry invention, she was ready.
Bray doesn’t have a background in launching products. She’s been mostly involved in advertising and graphic design during her career. But she couldn’t find a workable solution that stopped her bed sheets from bunching up when placed in the washer or dryer.
“I was sick and tired with dealing with sheets that were wadding up. I was very displeased with all of the time and energy I was wasting and couldn’t believe there was nothing on the market to solve this and never had been,” she said.
And, as washing machines and dryers got more advanced and sheets were made with deeper pockets, Bray only saw the problem worsen. So, she decided one day to observe her bundled-up nemesis.
“I would literally sit and watch it happen. I’d stand in front of my dryer looking in that glass door and they were defiant,” she said of the sheets. “I sat and watched and thought about it for a long time. Then I figured out the physics behind why it was happening and how to stop that.”
Her first product iteration was a failure, but she went back to the drawing board and eventually developed the prototype for Wad-Free for Bed Sheets.
The concept for the product is straightforward, as users are instructed to place each of the corners of their sheets into the small tabs. From there, Bray says the product cleans sheets better, dries them quicker and eliminates the possibility of bunching or twisting. The product, which costs $18.99 for two wad preventers, has nearly 2,000 reviews on Amazon with a cumulative rating of 4.3.
Bray said she has a lot of initial skeptics that don’t believe her product will solve this age-old problem but added that they quickly realize its effectiveness once they try it.
“Word-of-mouth on this product has been outstanding, people are buying them in mass quantity and gifting them to everybody they know,” she said.
Before she ever had her first shipment of product, Bray applied to "Shark Tank." Despite the newness of her idea, she was confident that she’d appear on that national stage.
“I’ve had a lot of ideas in my life that I’ve never acted on. I’ve gone so far as writing business plans, but never acted on them,” she said. “If you had told me that in two years [I’d appear on "Shark Tank"], I wouldn’t have thought it was that hairbrained of an idea. I felt like I’ve had something like this in me.”
In preparation for the episode, Bray is trying to build her inventory to meet potential customer demand. She’s run into production issues caused by Covid-19 and is hopeful she’ll have enough stock on hand by the time her episode airs on Friday, November 5 at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.
Independent of the outcome of Friday’s show, Bray is confident that she’s solved the problem of laundry bunching with Wad-Free and will be releasing additional products in the future.
“We’ve put men on the moon, we can livestream to the International Space Station in real-time, all of these problems have been solved, but our bed sheets are still wadding up,” she said. “Now the solution is here.”
