FIGS Founders: How Scrubs Became a $2.5B Brand

Here is a pitch almost no investor wants to hear: your customer is a sliver of the population, maybe seven percent, and the product is something people are legally required to wear anyway. That was the case for adult incontinence, and it was the case for hospital scrubs. There are 24 million healthcare workers in the United States, also about seven percent of the population (03:46). For decades, nearly all of them bought the same shapeless, boxy uniform at a strip-mall supply store stocked with bedpans and crutches. Heather Hasson and Trina Spear looked at that fraction of the population and saw a market nobody else had bothered to measure correctly. In 2013 they launched FIGS. Today it trades publicly at a market cap of over two and a half billion dollars (04:13).

Hasson did not arrive at this by a straight line. She wanted to be a reconstructive surgeon, failed organic chemistry, and drifted into fashion, designing handbags in New York with an Italian business partner who died of lung cancer at 36 (07:53). Heartbroken, she went to Kenya with no money and no plan. There she noticed children skipping school because they had no uniforms, and she started working retail at $9 an hour in Malibu (11:38) to buy fabric and hire sewers to make ties, funding 10,000 kids through school (12:42). In a Kenyan clinic, she watched nurses and doctors with 25 years of experience operate without proper scrubs. She sent some over. That is the entire origin of a billion-dollar apparel company: a woman trying to clear her head who kept noticing what people had to wear to do serious work.

Back in Los Angeles, Hasson sewed a small batch of forest-green scrubs, maybe 30 pairs, and sent them out to a couple of clinics. A nurse practitioner she met for coffee asked her to tailor a pair. Then the nurse's coworkers wanted the same thing.

"This is weird... And then that's when it shifted in my head, 'This is what I wanna do.'" (16:09)

Trina Spear came from the opposite direction: Harvard Business School, then a job in finance at the private equity firm Blackstone in New York. A mutual friend introduced her to Hasson in 2012. Spear flew to Los Angeles, got beaten at tennis, and heard the pitch. What hooked her was not sentiment but a gap she could see in the data. Nike, Lululemon, and Under Armour had spent decades building technical gear for athletes. Nobody was building technical gear for people who worked 12-hour shifts saving lives.

The math nobody else had run

Spear did not quit her job for six months. Instead, she built a financial model. What she found reframed the whole opportunity. Healthcare apparel is mandated: workers have to wear it every day to go to work. It is replenishment-driven, meaning customers reorder constantly rather than waiting for a holiday season, which makes it a non-seasonal, non-cyclical business (23:10). Healthcare employment is recession-resistant. And crucially, 85 percent of healthcare professionals were buying their own uniforms out of pocket (23:53), which meant the real customer was the individual nurse or doctor, not a hospital purchasing department. The U.S. market alone was worth about $12 billion, and the global market about $80 billion (24:14).

Yet the incumbents selling into that market had built a business that could never improve. Traditional scrub manufacturers sold through distributors, handing over 60 percent of the retail price to retailers and another 8 to 12 percent to license holders for brands like Dickies and Cherokee (42:22). That left almost nothing to spend on fabric, fit, or design. FIGS cut out the distributor entirely and sold direct to the healthcare worker. Its production cost ran roughly double what a traditional scrub maker spent, but it only had to charge 15 to 20 percent more at retail, because it had eliminated the middlemen taking most of the margin (42:22). That arithmetic, not a clever ad campaign, is why a slim-fit pant or a sleeveless layering top (the "Raffaella," which early customers called a muscle shirt) could become a bestseller: the company could actually afford to design something new.

Proving this to investors was another matter. FIGS collected something like 300 to 400 rejections during its early fundraising rounds (43:19). The objection was almost always the same: the addressable market looked too small. Spear's response became a kind of operating philosophy:

"We were very focused on getting fast nos. So, you know, when people were not sure or were not getting back to us, okay, that's a no." (43:50)

The money that got them through those early years was personal, and expensive. Spear liquidated her 401k retirement account to put in $70,000, acknowledging it was "a horrible tax decision" that cost her roughly 50 percent of the account's value to taxes and penalties (29:06). A friends-and-family round in 2013 raised $2 million from 40 to 50 investors writing $5,000 and $10,000 checks (36:49). It was not venture capital. It was people who believed two specific founders could pull this off.

Clearing the table, then facing a trial

The turning point came through Thomas Tull, a wealthy entertainment executive who ran Legendary Entertainment. An early investor pushed the founders to meet him in hopes of getting FIGS scrubs into movies; nothing came of the movie idea, but Tull invested in the seed round and the Series A. In 2017, he went further: he bought out every other investor on the cap table and put in $65 million of his own money, becoming FIGS' majority owner (49:37). It was a bet with real teeth attached: one earlier investor, a group called Campfire Capital, had tried to remove Hasson and Spear as operators, and part of the reason Tull bought them out was precisely to protect the founders' control (51:17). Even after Tull's investment, Hasson and Spear kept two of the three board seats, which meant they never lost the vote on their own company (50:50).

That discipline mattered because the company's growth soon invited a fight. Revenue went from $55 million in 2018 to $263 million in 2020 (51:17). As FIGS' visibility grew, Strategic Partners, which owns scrub brands including Dickies and Cherokee, sued the company in 2019, alleging false claims and trade secret theft, and seeking $800 million in damages (55:17). The case dragged on for roughly three years. FIGS refused to settle and spent $40 million in direct legal fees fighting it (54:09), plus an unquantified cost in founder time sitting through depositions. Hasson's reasoning was blunt:

"We were being sued for, I believe it was $800 million... so if we're gonna spend 40 or 60, that's absolutely worth it because we knew we were gonna win." (55:17)

FIGS went public in May 2021, a year after its best sales year to date. Spear is careful to separate going public from cashing in on momentum; she frames the IPO as recognition that the company had reached the scale and discipline of a public business, and as a chance to bring 150 healthcare professionals to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. The market, however, did not stay sentimental. The stock climbed to $50 in its first month, then fell to around $5 a year later (63:34), a swing that took the founders from Forbes' wealthiest-women lists to off them in a single cycle. Spear's read on that volatility doubles as a tidy description of how public markets work:

"Over time it's a weighing machine. In the short term, it's a voting machine." (63:12)