phae Wonders continues, a series about the people rewriting their own rules. This time: Emily deSousa, who traded eight years in SaaS customer success for a laundromat in Pacific Beach, San Diego.

There is a version of this story that gets told as a joke. Person hates their job, laughs about opening a laundromat instead, everyone at the table laughs along, nobody does it.

Emily deSousa did it.

She spent close to eight years in customer success, most recently in digital asset management, and for a long time she loved it. But the role kept getting pulled somewhere she didn't want to go. "I saw myself getting pushed, pushed, pushed more towards sales," she says. "I just felt like the landscape was changing." The work never actually ended — twelve, thirteen-hour days, and the to-do list was still long the next morning, and the morning after that.

So she asked the question underneath all of it. Do I love this? The answer split in two. She loved customers. That part was true and stayed true. The rest — the stress, the sales pressure, the anxiety that came home with her — wasn't working anymore.

Out of that reevaluation came an idea most people would say out loud once and never mention again: "Oh, I could maybe do a laundromat."

Why we are making this series

phae exists because the path most people were handed doesn't hold up the way it used to. One job, one ladder, climb it for forty years — that script is failing in public, and it was failing quietly for a long time before that.

Most people can't picture an alternative because they've never seen one up close. That's the gap phae Wonders is built to close. Real people, real pivots, and the parts of the story nobody puts on a highlight reel — not as inspiration, but as evidence that the path is wider than it looks from inside a job that isn't working anymore.

The pivot wasn't reckless. It was overdue.

Emily had lived in San Diego for more than twenty years by the time she opened her doors. Pacific Beach is her neighborhood — she wasn't parachuting into a market, she was building something for people she already knew.

The space she found had a rough history. It was the kind of place neighbors avoided rather than visited. She gutted it, designed the brand herself, sourced the equipment, and navigated a buildout that she now calls the hardest and most rewarding thing she's ever done. Pacific Beach Laundry Co. opened its doors on April 17, 2026.

This is the part career advice tends to skip past. Indeed's research on career changers found that people who make a real pivot deliberate for close to a year before acting, and that 88% report being happier once they do. The deliberation isn't the delay before the real work starts. It is the real work — the part where you quietly test whether the version of your life you're imagining could actually hold weight.

Emily's version held. "My entire life has changed," she says. The anxiety that used to define her workdays is gone. The permanent, never-shrinking to-do list is gone. What replaced it, in her own words, is peace.

She didn't start over. She redeployed.

Here's the detail that reframes the whole story. Emily didn't leave her career behind when she left SaaS — she brought the best parts of it with her.

Everything she spent eight years obsessing over in tech — the customer experience, the small details nobody else would notice, building something people actually want to come back to — she poured directly into this store. The skill was never "software." The skill was making people feel taken care of, and that travels.

It shows in how she runs the place. One of her early Google reviews said the laundromat felt "like a clean room," and she laughed reading it, because that's exactly what she was going for. When you're doing your laundry, you want a clean space — that's the whole job, and she designed for it on purpose.

phae never treats a career change as demolition. It goes looking for what a person is already carrying — the instincts, the standards, the things they're good at without noticing — and helps them see where that could go next.

The business is laundry. The product is peace of mind.

Ask Emily what she built and the machines are almost beside the point.

The laundromat has done well since the day it opened, and she'll tell you that's not an accident. It's the same instinct that made her good at customer success, applied somewhere she gets to see the results in person: a customer walking in, doing their laundry, and leaving in a better mood than they arrived. A space that used to make the block feel less safe now makes it feel more like a neighborhood.

That's the through-line of this whole series. The job title changes. The thing a person is actually good at — the thing that makes people trust them — usually doesn't.

What is next

phae Wonders will keep going: more people, more pivots, more proof that the path you were handed is one option among many, not the only one.

If you're in Pacific Beach, Emily's laundromat is at 4977 Cass St, San Diego, CA 92109 — pacificbeachlaundryco.com.

And if you're the one quietly thinking about your own version of a laundromat — the idea you've said out loud once and then dropped — that's not a distraction from your career. That's the start of one. It's exactly where phae starts too.

phae™ is the guide that helps you flourish in a world that won't stop changing. Start with the Career Explorer, free, always.