Today's episode starts with a cup of coffee. Just two friends catching up after a long shift; one of them a nurse practitioner at Cedars-Sinai, still in her scrubs. And Heather Hasson looked at her friend and thought: you are a highly educated professional who just spent sixteen hours keeping people alive. Why are you wearing that?

Heather Hasson is the co-founder of FIGS — the medical apparel brand that went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021, making her and co-founder Trina Spear the first female co-founders to take a company public together. She built a brand in a $10 billion industry that nobody had bothered to innovate in for decades. In this episode I talk about what she saw that everyone else had stopped seeing, what she did about it with a tape measure and a kitchen table, how she and Trina sold scrubs out of a car trunk in hospital parking lots during shift changes, and why the most radical business idea is sometimes also the most obvious human one. This one is about paying attention. About looking at the people doing the hard, invisible work and deciding they deserve something better. I think it'll stay with you.

Sources & Disclaimer

• FIGS — wearfigs.com/pages/our-story
• Surface Magazine — Don't Want No Scrubs? #WearFIGS (December 2019)
• Fast Company — Female Founders Give Scrubs a Functional, Fashionable Makeover (August 2018)
• Inc. Magazine — Medical Scrubs Are a $10 Billion Market, but No One Liked Them — Until This Startup Made Them Cool (August 2018)
• Built on YES — Heather Hasson & Trina Spear: The Women Who Reinvented Scrubs and Made $700M Doing It (March 2025)
• Wikipedia — FIGS entry
• Meghan, Duchess of Sussex — Confessions of a Female Founder Podcast, Episode: Disrupting the Dress Code with FIGS' Heather Hasson (May 2025)

All facts shared in this episode are based on information available at the time of recording. Any personal reflections, interpretations, or opinions are my own. If anything is found to be inaccurate, I'm happy to issue a correction.