FIGS: Trina Spear and Heather Hasson. The $2.5 Billion Scrubs Brand That Investors Said Would Never Work

October 26, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In 2013, Heather Hasson was selling scrubs out of the trunk of her car outside emergency rooms in Los Angeles, a hobby she started after noticing that nurses and doctors in Kenya had no proper uniforms. By 2021, she and her co-founder Trina Spear had taken Figs public at a valuation that briefly made them billionaires. A year later, the stock had collapsed from $50 to $5, and they fell off the Forbes wealthiest women list. "We're an eight billion dollar company, now we're a $400 million company, $600 million company, now we're a $2 billion," Spear says. "It's so transient and you can't get really tied emotionally to any of it in terms of your self-worth, let alone your net worth."

The Insight Nobody Wanted

Hasson's path to scrubs was anything but linear. After her handbag business partner died of lung cancer, she went to northern Kenya to clear her head. There, she walked into an operating theater where doctors and nurses with 25 years of experience had no scrubs. She sent them some. Back in Los Angeles, she sat in hospital coffee shops and noticed that healthcare workers wore baggy, ill-fitting, scratchy uniforms. When she asked a nurse practitioner friend why, the answer was simply: that's what scrubs are.

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What you'll learn

1 (01:46) **The Stock Rollercoaster and Why It Doesn't Define Them** - The founders discuss the brutal volatility of their public stock, from a $50 high to a $5 low, and the lesson that market cap is transient and not tied to self-worth.
2 (02:46) **The Core Insight: Why Scrubs Were a Huge Opportunity** - Guy Raz frames the business thesis: a niche 7% of the population (healthcare workers) is a massive, loyal, and underserved market, just like adult incontinence.
3 (05:02) **Heather's Origin: From Reconstructive Surgeon to Handbag Designer** - Heather describes her failed dream of becoming a surgeon and her early entrepreneurial ventures, including a handbag business that ended when her partner died of cancer.
4 (08:33) **The Kenya Epiphany: How Uniforms Create Dignity** - After her business partner's death, Heather traveled to Kenya to clear her head, where she discovered the power of uniforms to enable children to attend school and healthcare workers to perform their jobs with pride.
5 (13:49) **The First Scrubs: Made in LA, Sold Out of a Car** - Heather describes the scrappy, hands-on process of designing and manufacturing her first batch of scrubs in Los Angeles, then personally selling them to healthcare workers.
6 (19:13) **Trina's Arrival: The Harvard MBA Meets the Scrub Seller** - Trina, a Blackstone analyst, was introduced to Heather through a mutual friend and was immediately hooked by the idea of creating high-performance gear for people who save lives.
7 (22:24) **Why the Market Was a Goldmine (and Why Investors Missed It)** - Trina explains the unattractive but highly profitable structural dynamics of the scrub industry: mandated purchase, replenishment-driven, non-seasonal, and recession-resistant.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Heather Hasson and Trina Spear saw an opportunity nobody else seemed to notice: millions of healthcare workers were spending long days in uncomfortable, ill-fitting scrubs.

So they set out to reinvent them.

Heather was a designer with almost no money. To join her, Trina left a prestigious job at Blackstone and cashed out her retirement. They sold scrubs out of a car, got rejected by hundreds of investors, and eventually built FIGS into a multibillion-dollar public company.

Along the way, they paid $40 million to fight a lawsuit, navigated a pandemic, and watched their company’s valuation swing by billions.

This week, Heather and Trina share how they built the “Lululemon of Scrubs”—and why your net worth is not the same thing as self worth.

What you’ll learn

How a trip to Kenya changed Heather’s view of uniforms–and led her to start her own scarf and tie business
How Heather spotted an opportunity in a stale category: healthcare workers want comfortable clothes, too
How free coffee became a tool for customer growth
How the founders endured hundreds of investor rejections and learned to pursue a quick no
How FIGS built a community that is “diehard obsessed” with their products
How it pays–and what it costs– to defend your company against competitor lawsuits
Why net worth shouldn’t determine self-worth
How Heather and Trina think about resilience, luck, and building a company that lasts

Timestamps:

07:05 - Heather’s dreams to become a surgeon and launch a handbag business fall through, so she takes a life-changing trip to Kenya

13:53 - Heather meets a healthcare friend for coffee: “What are you wearing?... This is garbage.”

20:46 - Trina beats Heather in a tennis match, and the two become business partners

29:38 - Trina walks away from Blackstone to join Heather, and everyone asks, “What are you doing?”

35:05 - FIGS launches: Healthcare workers get it, but investors don’t

47:56 - A big-time investor comes on board—from the movie business

52:17 - A competitor sues for $800 million, and Heather and Trina use anger to their advantage

59:46 - COVID hits… and a year later, FIGS goes public

1:08:22 - No major plans to diversify: FIGS is all-in on scrubs for now

This episode was researched and produced by Katherine Sypher with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant. Our audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez.

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