Jil Ross had been turned down twice when she decided to make one more appeal.
The Chicago entrepreneur was trying to get Teen Kleen, her new foaming body wash for teens and tweens, onto Walmart.com. Her first application was denied. So was her first appeal.
Try No. 3 got a different result: It moved forward. Walmart’s legal department asked for documentation showing her manufacturer was certified and that she had legal representation, a trademark and business insurance. All things Ross already had in order.
“I’m proud that I didn’t take their no,” Ross told Technical.ly.
Teen Kleen went live on Walmart.com this month. It’s another milestone in a career pathway Ross started after leaving a long-term job at United Airlines in her early 50s.
Before leaving in 2017, she had spent 31 years at the airline. Since then, she’s gone to film school, made a feature film, entered retail and taught herself product development and ecommerce.
Now Ross does business as Funda Brands, with products including Crimson Cloth, a bleach-resistant burgundy menstruation towel, and Teen Kleen.
Ross hopes her second act can be a model for other women over 50. Friends still working in corporate jobs have told her watching her build something new has changed how they think about what comes next. And some of her biggest lessons have come from consumers several generations younger.
Learning from a younger generation
Ross spent 31 years at United Airlines, most of them working part time while raising her children. In 2023, she started writing children’s books. By 2017, her youngest had finished college and Ross, then in her early 50s, decided it was time for something different.
After leaving United, Ross enrolled in film school through Second City, where she said she was both the oldest and the only Black student in the program.
Her work eventually included the children’s web series “CHI-nanigans” and the feature film “B.A.D.D.,” which screened at the Martha’s Vineyard Comedy Fest in 2023.
That trip is what unexpectedly led her to retail. The rental house on the Vineyard provided something she’d never seen before: black towels meant for removing makeup. They reminded her of growing up with her father, three sisters and a foster sister sharing one bathroom, and the embarrassment of stained towels when several of them were menstruating at once.
“I’ve always wished that there was a burgundy towel that women could use when they were on their periods,” Ross said.
Back in Chicago, she started looking into whether she could make one. That idea became Crimson Cloth, a dark red cotton towel designed to be bleached without staining or fading.
Ross said customer research she conducted through the University of Chicago’s Polsky Exchange suggested women 40 and older were more likely to identify with menstrual stigma than younger women. “It’s just a generation thing,” Ross said. Product reviews suggest Crimson Cloth has also resonated with adults dealing with postpartum bleeding and fibroids.
Teen Kleen came later, after Ross picked up her sister’s teen and tween kids following a full day of ice skating, color guard and theater.
“The funk was real,” she said, recalling her visceral reaction.
She offered them her almond body scrub. They wanted no part of it. That’s when she realized how little existed for that age group; there was plenty of body wash for babies and adults, but next to nothing made specifically for teens.
Ross worked with a chemical engineer for nearly eight months developing Teen Kleen, tested it with young consumers directly, and later hired research firm Verasight to survey 100 families about how they chose body-care products.
Teen Kleen launched on Walmart.com in three scents: pineapple, watermelon and lavender. The teens and tweens who tried them didn’t seem to think of any of them as gendered, Ross said. Parents, however, did. “The boys who attended all the events, that was never a question for them,” she said. “But it’s a question for their moms.”
Ross is now considering a fourth, more traditionally masculine scent to meet that demand, even though the kids themselves never asked for one. That broader customer base is also why the original company name, Fundamenstrals, a play on “menstruation,” became Funda Brands.
Taking advantage of entrepreneurship programs while learning by doing
Ross came into retail knowing she had a lot to learn. She’s since gone through entrepreneurship programs at the University of Chicago, University of Illinois, the City of Chicago and the Women’s Business Development Center, along with the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center’s free 12-week Milestone Circles program.
Milestone Circles gave her a place to talk through the “fires” founders deal with, trade resources and pick up ecommerce basics. “Retail was never my jam,” Ross said.
Much of it she still had to figure out on her own. She learned that some brands hire outside firms to handle getting products onto retail platforms. That was an expense she couldn’t afford, so she taught herself instead, correcting course each time a submission got rejected.
The business has been almost entirely bootstrapped. When her attorney quoted her $2,500 for trademark registration, Ross picked up substitute teaching work to cover it.
Marketing is the next thing she’s trying to crack. Ross promotes the products herself, has reached out to chapters of the youth organization Jack and Jill around the country and is applying for small-business grants. Her next goal is getting Teen Kleen and Crimson Cloth onto physical Walmart shelves.
Longer term, she’d like to build something a major consumer-products company would want to acquire. She’s also holding onto film after acquiring the rights to adapt a best-selling book.
She doesn’t see much reason to limit herself to one thing. Since turning 50, she said, going to more funerals has made her more aware of how easy it is to keep putting things off.
“I gave 31 years to United,” Ross said. “Let me give 32 to myself.”
