The Wing’s Audrey Gelman On Building A Feminist Co-Working Empire

The Wing, a private women’s club just about as old as Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump, has had a good 22 months in co-working office.

31-year-olds Audrey Gelman and Lauren Kassan founded The Wing in 2016 as a women’s only organization focused on providing its members a collaborative space to work, socialize, learn, and seek shelter from the chaos of their daily professional lives.

In less than two years, The Wing has grown to 5,000 members strong and is ever-expanding, with countless names crowding its waitlist. Some of those names you might recognize: actress Lena Dunham, rapper Remy Ma, Glossier CEO Emily Weiss, and Chelsea Manning. The organization is also unusual in that its growth has been almost completely organic. The organization does not advertise itself, relying mostly on social media and word of mouth to grow membership, as well as its co-founders’ extensive networks.

Sounds a bit like a sorority? According to the Wing, it’s more of a coven.

The average age of a Wing member is 34, according to Gelman, but the space aims to attract a range of professional women in their 20 to 50s. To become a member, you apply on the website, where your application is then reviewed and approved by the organization. A membership to The Wing costs $215 per month or $2350 annually for single location access, and $250 per month or $2700 annually for access to all locations.

Since debuting its first location in New York City’s Flatiron district, The Wing has opened four other spaces in New York City, Washington D.C., and soon San Francisco in the fall. The organization also recently bought out the 11th floor in its Flatiron building and the 4th floor of its Soho building, and hired former Vogue communications director Zara Hahim as its first head of communications.

The Wing’s millennial pink existence has not been without controversy, however. Earlier this year, the New York City Commission on Human Rights launched an investigation into the club for its alleged discriminatory policies. The Wing does not allow men to join as members or visit its premises as guests. The investigation is ongoing, and the Wing has not commented on it beyond that statement.

A “woman only” policy also brings up the question of what exactly the Wing’s definition of a woman is. Does the membership policy also include non-binary individuals, and if so, to what extent? The Wing currently has transgender members, and states on its website that it is a “diverse community open to all,” but does not provide specifications beyond that.

An Unlikely CEO Story

Audrey Gelman was not always in the business of social clubs. She was raised in a family where “service and giving back was at the center of everything,” and knew nothing about the world of finance. Before the Wing, she worked on various Democratic election campaigns, including Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid in 2008, when she was still a student at New York University. In 2015, she left her job as a Senior Vice President at SKDKnickerbocker, a political consulting firm, to make the leap into entrepreneurship.

“Becoming a business owner was never my goal in life,” Gelman said. “For me, [entrepreneurship is] about creativity, being your own boss, having a dream, and then getting to creating it. It was never about a passion for spreadsheets or a business plan.”

The impetus for the Wing came from a revelation Gelman had while

In October 2016, at the crux of the election buzz, Gelman and her co-founder Kassan were under the impression that they were about to launch their women’s club just as Hillary Clinton would cinch the victory to become the nation’s first female president. Obviously, things didn’t go as planned.

Nonetheless, Gelman and Kassan put their heads down and went to work. Last November, the Wing was bestowed with $32 million in Series B funding from WeWork, in addition to an existing $8 million in Series A funding from investors.

Barely yet two years old, the Wing is continuing with its expansion plan into cities where members and spectators have been urging for more locations. Planned 2019 locations include Williamsburg, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, Paris, Toronto, and London.

“The level of growth we’ve experienced is beyond what we anticipated,” Gelman said. It was a level of demand that really outpaced everything that we had expected.”

Bringing Women Into The Fold

Inside the Wing’s Flatiron location on a Tuesday afternoon, the atmosphere was tranquil and extremely pink. Pink upholstery decorated the space, pink lamps rested on communal desks, and a cluster of pink metal chairs flooded one corner of the room in anticipation for a speaker event happening later that night. Women lounged around throughout the expansive, open-air space, working on laptops or talking to one another. There was a bathroom and shower area that was probably what a Chanel gym locker room would look like, and a cafe serving hummus platters and avocado toasts. A large poster on the wall listed community events in the next month, including book club meetings and astrology-themed cocktail nights.  

Visually and philosophically, the Wing takes pleasure in juxtaposing the old with the new. While the DNA of the organization is undoubtedly modern, it is also tongue-in-cheek vintage, connecting past and present through old stylistic elements in its typography, signage, and copy. Gelman said her team worked with a historian who looked through design archives of old womens clubs at Harvard to come up with a historic, yet refreshed, visual style.

“We wanted there to be a heritage feeling to the brand and resurrect that concept for modern women,” Gelman said. “We were referencing some of the old design styles from that period of time and incorporating it into the digital identity.”

But in the age of FaceTime and Instagram Stories, what makes the creation of a physical gathering space for women so important? We as a society have reached a “digital saturation point,” as Gelman explains it. “There is a nostalgia. We can’t all look at our phones every five seconds. Physical spaces where you can meet up with people with similar values are really appealing and attractive to a population that right now is in need of digital detox.”

In this sense, the Wing is very analog–but that embracement of the past extends beyond just its physical space and visual identity. Philosophically, the club has made a point to highlight the path women have paved long before the Wing existed. The “Know Her Name” feature of the Wing’s Twitter account, for example, posts frequent shoutouts of lesser known female figures in history, often women of color.

“What I was very inspired by was that the women’s clubs that existed in the 20s and 30s were very political,” Gelman said. “They played a huge role in the suffrage movements and giving back to their communities and mobilizing around social issues.”

Thousands of Women In The Men’s Bathroom

Gelman and Kassan ultimately envision The Wing to become a kind of mitochondria for feminism–a powerhouse where conversations can become catalysts and networks are strengthened and built. With the #MeToo movement and major national events like the Women’s March, America has been experiencing a cultural shift towards recognizing and carving out a space in society for the bodies and voices of women.

Gelman recalled a signature moment she experienced that helped crystallize her vision. The Wing had been open for a little over two months when 100 of its members piled onto two buses and drove to Washington to participate in the 2017 Women’s March in D.C. The group spent all day protesting, and left at 4 am in the morning.

“We stopped at this rest stop in Delaware, and it was just filled with women, like thousands of women,” Gelman said. “The men’s bathrooms had been taken over by women. I’ll never forget that moment. Every time one of our members walks into the Wing, they get to feel a bit of that moment.”

It’s clear even to the casual observer, however, that the Wing champions a liberal political stance with unusual transparency and fervor for a business entity. Its social media accounts promote issues such as abortion rights, transgender rights, as do its founders. The Wing also regularly hosts talks by female politicians, many of which have been Democrats, like the Democratic Socialist upstart Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett, and, this April, Hillary Rodham Clinton in the flesh.

Gelman said that The Wing has also hosted a number of speakers who are Republican, who have voted Republican, or consider themselves independent. While the Wing doesn’t collect information about members’ political viewpoints, Gelman noted that women in cities statistically lean more towards the progressive side. Given this, it’s no surprise The Wing’s political and social activism has been well received among its “coven” of members, while receiving its fair share of criticism–as politics so goes–from the outside world.

“I think that we do have a spectrum of political points of view that are represented,” Gelman said. “[But] I do think that anyone or any business who is credibly trying to engage with women and topics of empowerment right now has to feel comfortable and lean into conversations that are going on politically. There are lots of brands that would like to serve empowerment to women but won’t touch politics with a ten foot pole, and I just don’t think that is credible.”