Her Startup Collapsed. Her Comeback Won a Michelin Key.

Audrey Gelman’s first company grew fast and loud. She co-founded The Wing in October 2016 with Lauren Kassan, a women-only coworking and social-club company that opened in Manhattan’s Flatiron District on the promise of a “she shed for the digital age.” Investors followed the buzz: an $8 million Series A in April 2017 led by New Enterprise Associates, then a $32 million Series B that November led by WeWork, according to Forbes’ and Fast Company’s coverage of the round at the time. By the end of 2017 The Wing had grown to roughly 1,500 members, expanding into multiple U.S. cities on the strength of a brand built around 2016-era “girl-boss” feminism.

Then it came apart. Gelman resigned as CEO in June 2020, after current and former employees — many of them Black and Latina staff — publicly detailed a pattern of racist and inequitable treatment the company had failed to address, a reckoning that landed in the middle of a pandemic gutting the coworking industry. Gelman apologized publicly and stepped back from the business she’d built. The Wing never recovered: it shut down permanently on August 31, 2022, according to Wikipedia’s account of the closure.

Gelman’s next act looks almost nothing like the first, starting with its size. In 2022 she opened a small country-inspired home-goods store called The Six Bells in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill. Three years later, in June 2025, she expanded it into The Six Bells Countryside Inn, an 11-room hotel in Rosendale, New York, built inside a hotel building dating to 1850. Every room is tied to a fictional English village of Gelman’s own invention, Barrow’s Green — a concept she developed with hospitality veteran Jeremy Selman and design firm Greco Deco. “My thesis was nostalgia,” she told Travel + Leisure. “I like to build spaces that people can walk into and they feel like they’re in a different reality.” Rooms start around $350 a night with breakfast included, served at an on-site restaurant and tavern called The Feathers, run in partnership with Hudson Valley restaurateur Molly Levine.

The bet on escapism found an audience fast. Hudson Valley Magazine reported that Six Bells Countryside Inn was named a One-Key hotel in the Michelin Guide’s 2025 selection for the Catskills and Hudson Valley — a recognition system Michelin only began applying to hotels a few years ago, and one the inn earned within its first year open. Gelman has described the appeal in genre terms: “There’s a reason they call [cozy crime] that,” she told The Telegraph. “The world is overwhelming and I wanted to create that kind of escapism that felt a little bit evocative of mysteries of the past.”

It’s a much smaller stage than the one Gelman built and lost at The Wing — eleven rooms and one restaurant, not a multi-city membership network chasing a nine-figure valuation. That scaled-down shape is its own kind of second act: Heather Whaling built Geben Communication into a multi-million-dollar agency without ever taking the kind of outside capital that fueled The Wing’s rise and, eventually, its collapse. And starting over completely, in a category with no track record, is the same instinct that took Brynn Putnam from a $500 million exit into building a board-game console company from scratch rather than try to rebuild what she’d already done once.