There’s no single reason or uniting circumstance behind women founders returning to resurrect the companies they built—except this.

BY CHRISTINE LAGORIO-CHAFKIN @LAGORIO

The email would lead to the $1 million acquisition of her company. But when it landed in her in-box in September 2016, Ashley Murphy thought it was spam. The co-founder of Neat Method, a home-organization franchise she’d launched in San Francisco, had never considered an acquisition.

The company, founded by Murphy, Molly Graves, and Marissa Hagmeyer, was still relatively young. It had 17 franchise licensees across the United States, but they still considered it a lifestyle business. “We were like, ‘Wait, are you serious about this?’” Murphy laughs now.

After a year of getting to know Whitmor, the home-organization product manufacturing firm based in Memphis that had sent the query, she and her co-founders agreed in 2017 that an acquisition by the larger company could be the perfect way to help their brand branch out into retail. They’d long dreamed of designing and selling their own line of jars, baskets, and organizing tools.

Over the years following the acquisition, Neat Method operated mostly autonomously from Whitmor. The former grew its franchise footprint significantly, and began retailing sustainably made organizing products. But questions arose as Neat also grew to 80 franchise owners and multiple prongs of product-retail: online, through franchisees, and in-store. Whitmor had helped Neat Method get on track to scale—but now that........

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