Confessions of a Female Founder with Meghan
Disrupting the Dress Code with FIGS’ Heather Hasson
Tue, 13 May 2025
On today’s episode, Meghan sits down with Heather Hasson, the founder of FIGS, a company that has completely revolutionized the medical apparel industry. What began with Heather selling scrubs outside hospitals for cash has since grown into a billion-dollar brand that’s reshaping how healthcare professionals think and feel about their workwear. In this conversation, the pair share the challenges and triumphs of building a company from the ground up, the steep learning curve of entrepreneurship, and why staying close to the day-to-day details still matters. Follow Meghan @Meghan and Heather @heatherhasson on Instagram. Stay up to date with us @LemonadaMedia on X, Facebook, and Instagram. For a list of current sponsors and discount codes for this and every other Lemonada show, go to lemonadamedia.com/sponsors. Joining Lemonada Premium is a great way to support our shows and get bonus content. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Main Theme: “Crabbuckit” words and music by Kevin Deron Brereton (c) Universal Songs of Polygram Int., Inc. on behalf of Universal Music Publishing Canada (BMI) / 100% interest for the Territory.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: Who is Heather Hasson and what is FIGS?
Heather Hassan turned that hustle into something so much bigger. She built Figs alongside her co-founder, Trina Spear, and together they turned healthcare apparel into a billion-dollar business. They created scrubs that are stylish, colorful, comfortable, and they're made with their customers' top of mind. Figs is the ultimate if-you-know-you-know brand. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
They're everywhere. I can't wait for you to hear this conversation with Heather. Let's dive in. How are we doing? We're doing great. How are you? Really good. I'm so happy to meet you. When I had met Trina at G9... She may have mentioned it to you. I don't know. She was very surprised when I knew what FIGS was. She said, I have a company called FIGS. I said, I know FIGS. She goes, do you actually?
It was almost like a test.
Megan, how do you know FIGS?
Well, you guys have been around for a while. But any time that you see somebody either for... I think it transcends beyond hospitals. In someone's home, they have on FIGS uniforms. But also, I work with Children's Hospital LA. And I see a lot of the people wearing that. And you just saw that something shifted from...
When I was young and you'd be in any sort of medical setting and you saw very ill-fitting scrubs that were probably not comfortable, too, things are looking a little more tailored. And I remember going, wow, that looks so different. And just knowing it and clocking it and seeing the little figs logo on there. So I just know your brand.
Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. I love that you know who we are. Honestly, like I think what you've created is so amazing. I was just watching your show the other day too. Oh, thank you. Because I'm a terrible cook. I can't cook anything, but I'll bring you lemonade or something like in the juice world. I could do that. Great. But you can teach me something probably.
Yes, you'll have to come over, come to the garden and we'll like whip something up. It's very easy. I think the whole point for me, and you'll probably speak to this too, is when you see something that is an easy solve in the everyday, That's not complicated. It's not fussy. How do you get your hands involved and change the way of thinking surrounding it so it doesn't feel daunting?
You know, I see vegetables and I see takeout because I don't have time to cook every day. And I go... all right, but how do I still make this flattering and beautiful and present well and something that people find appetizing? And for you, you go, hold on, this is something that you're doing every day. You're wearing this uniform every day. You're eating every day.
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Chapter 2: How did Heather transition from medical school to entrepreneurship?
For the people who are listening going, I'm 21. What do you mean you raised capital? How do you raise capital?
Honestly, it was at the time I didn't even know what VC was. I wasn't really in tune with anything with finance, like zero. Mm-hmm. Zero, zero. I think it was just kind of innate. I just went to friends, family, people I didn't even know.
I was in New York at the time, asked around, and then met some folks, and they gave me a little bit of cash, and I took that little bit of cash, and I started this tiny company, moved to Italy, and then... It didn't do very well. The bags are beautiful. They were gorgeous. What kind of bags were they? They were like just giant handbags. They were big, oversized handbags. Beautiful.
And by the way, if you were so drawn to precision and the dissection of something, the manufacturing of a very detailed bag or piece of clothing has that same level of Almost surgical precision if you're talking about the craftsmanship of it.
Yeah, exactly. And I was like, well, at least if I can't, you know, be in surgery, at least I can do this. Right. But then it was actually my, I had a business partner at the time and he passed away from lung cancer. Oh, I'm so sorry. It's okay. I mean, I was super young and he was a little older and he was a wonderful human. And after that, I just folded the company and went straight to Kenya.
So I was just going there because my business partner passed away. I was in the hospital for a really long time with him and I just needed a break. And so then I went over to Kenya and then I started going to these clinics and I saw everybody not wearing scrubs. And I'm like, what's going on? You know, how come nobody's wearing scrubs?
This, you know, this one nurse, she was a nurse for 25 years, never had a set of scrubs. The surgeon didn't have a set of scrubs. So then I came back to Los Angeles and I'm like, you know what? Let me donate some scrubs. Let me just give some scrubs to people who, the people that I met out there, they'd never had a set of scrubs before.
And so I manufactured like, I don't know, 10 and sent them out. So you didn't just go and buy them.
You manufactured 10 sets of scrubs.
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Chapter 3: What inspired Heather to start making scrubs?
Because she'd been on Wall Street, right? And she still does more of the op side and the business side. And you're more of the creative, I would guess. Yeah.
I think actually Trina is very creative. I think she undersells herself, but she is very, very, very creative. She's honestly, she's my best buddy and a real fantastic business partner. It's because we come from two totally different places in the world that we see things very differently and we always have very healthy conversations.
But she's way more dynamic than, you know, than, okay, the business person, the ops person, because she is very creative. And I would say probably the same thing for myself. Because when you are running a company at that scale, you have to be both. Right? You have to be. You can't just be like, okay, I'm going to do the numbers or I'm going to do this. Right? You have to be able to do everything.
Well, especially at a startup phase, you're wearing so many hats. Yeah. You have to think about the customer experience. You have to think about your P&L. You have to think about what your long-term trajectory is. I don't know if as you guys were conceiving this, and even to my understanding, when you met, it wasn't with the intention of bringing on a business partner.
You met, you knew she was savvy, and then within a couple weeks, you guys realized you should be partners and do this together. How did that happen?
Oh, she's relentless. She, I was like, she was, you know, this came from Blackstone Private Equity, Harvard Business School, right? Yeah. And she said to me, and I'll never forget, I'll never, ever forget this. She said to me, she goes, Heather, I will do everything you don't want to do. And I said, everything? And she goes, everything. Wow. And I said, we're playing tennis.
And we shook hands and that was it. I said, let's go. Wow. And you believed her. You knew it was true. Yeah, I knew it was true. And I thought it was really cool that she was, you know, quitting this high paying job on Wall Street, you know, coming to work on scrubs that were a little tiny company. She just believed in the vision. She's like, I see it.
Why do you think she believed in it of all the things, of all the investments and all the opportunities and all the decks that get sent and all the possibilities and all the friends of a friend that say, oh, you should go and do this? Why was it this?
You know, I have asked her that a few times, right? And I think it was... I think she believed in me and the vision. And I think she knew that I was absolutely relentless and I knew this was, you know, that you can essentially create the world you want to live in. And she's like, I want to, I want to join this and I want to create the world I want to live in. And let's, let's do this together.
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Chapter 4: How did Heather manufacture and sell the first scrubs?
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So you and Trina decide to be partners. She leaves Blackstone. You're getting your ducks in a row. You were getting feedback on some of the items, and they were saying they're just not fitting quite right. Oh, yeah. What was that moment at the beginning? Because as a founder, we all have that, oh, my gosh, I've crossed every T and dotted every I, and how on earth did I miss that?
Yes, that was actually, it was really funny. Funny now. It's funny now. Probably not funny then. It was then because we didn't have any money, so it was not funny. Yeah, so our first production run. So it took me about a couple of years to actually design our fabric. And then, you know, I did our first production run. And at the time, right, I'm chasing mail trucks. I'm sitting in hospitals.
I'm selling out of hospitals, right? That's how we sold, right? In front of it. I sat there and I sold right in front of a hospital, in front of an ER, seven in the morning and seven at night. Oh, so that's really interesting.
So you were there at a shift change. At a shift change. Yeah. You knew when they'd be coming in and out of their cars. Right. And you could be there with your, I mean, what were people using to, were they buying with cash or did you have this swipe? What was that?
How were you doing sales? So in the beginning, we didn't have Square. So that didn't exist yet. Right. So we just had cash. Yeah. No one was tapping their phone. No tapping. We didn't have any tapping. I wish we did. But it was just cash. And I hired folks from Craigslist just to stand next to me. So I can be like, here's the male, right? And here's the female, right?
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Chapter 5: How did Heather meet her co-founder Trina Spear and form their partnership?
And also, were you and do you continue to meet with the trends on how that should look? Or do you just say these are evergreen? These are the styles that we do. The colors pop in a different way. You know, I'm just curious how you did that. And equally, the second part of that question would be when you talk about sizing.
And you're incredible in what FIGS does in terms of accommodating so many different body types and shapes and sizes. What that does for you from an inventory standpoint, because I think a lot of small businesses certainly at the onset are so scared of having inventory just sitting on their shelves because they don't know which units are going to move first.
So I think we are fortunate in the position that we are in a uniform business, right? So we could have a long shelf life if we need to, right? So it doesn't go out of style. We're not going to go out of style.
So more timeless designs than are key. So it doesn't feel like you're not going to have a puffed shoulder anymore. cool, like, on-trend scrub style. You're keeping something that will work no matter what.
And if we do, we buy a smaller run. So if something is on-trend, we buy, you know, obviously a smaller run of that. And we buy specific, too, of something if we believe, for example, wide leg, right? If we know that in Texas, wide leg's going to be more popular, we just kind of focus on that region for that specific style. Yeah.
But I think going back to the colors, that has to be innate and it has to come from within. Like I had a real issue with the colors in hospitals. So what was a hospital standard of color really bothered me. Why? I didn't like the mix. I think something should be, let's say we have a graphite and our graphite's heathered. Heathered is dyeing 50% of the yarns and not dyeing the other 50%.
So it gives a softer gray look. And it feels more textured and multidimensional. Yeah. So I think in order to elevate healthcare professionals, they can't have something that's flat, right? And that's this boring standard gray that blends in, you know, it's just... Drab. Yeah. So that was a big issue for me. And the hospitals pushed back for many, many, many years. And I said, okay.
It's not going to come from the top down, but it will come from the bottoms up. And that's how we built our business from the bottoms up, right? So the healthcare professionals are saying, we want the graphite, we want the graphite, right? And so eventually then we get the call from the hospital saying, cool, we're going to work with you and we want the graphite, right?
Our healthcare professionals will allow them to wear graphite instead of our standard gray.
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Chapter 6: What were the early production challenges FIGS faced?
Yeah, we still work with the same manufacturers. I mean, many, many more, but yes. Yes. Yes.
Wow, that's great. Well, I also love just the loyalty in that because they believed in you. They were incentivized because they wanted it, but they believed in your vision from the beginning. It suddenly becomes really personal.
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The large question that a lot of people listening will probably ask is, how do you get someone to buy into your vision? How do you get someone to believe in the thing as deeply as you do? Because as you're saying, you went through so many no's, like an auditioning actor, before you heard yes. But what makes that yes happen? Is that just timing? Is that the right connection?
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Chapter 7: How does Heather balance attention to detail and leadership as FIGS grows?
What do you end up doing in that immediate moment when you recognize we're going to have to action something and you're kind of figuring it out in real time, I think, as the rest of the world was, but you know it directly affects your business and how you can show up for your customer?
Yeah, I think we were a little bit ahead of the normal commercial world since we are so in tune with healthcare. But we didn't realize the magnitude of what was going to happen. Nobody did. Right. So it was honestly our partnering with our manufacturers. It was... partnering with anybody who we knew to get our masks to healthcare professionals.
I mean, we had calls saying, I'm using a mask eight times and I'm putting it in the oven to sterilize it and my institution's not helping us out. Oh my gosh. They couldn't help them out. And it was our duty as a company to protect and to provide gear for healthcare professionals, right? They're on the front lines. Right. And so we just...
did everything we could to get hundreds of thousands of masks to healthcare professionals. We just gave them out for free. We made oxypulses. So that was a huge thing too. The pulse oximeters? Yeah. Oh, interesting. I didn't know you did that. Yeah. That was a really big deal because with the breathing and healthcare professionals were handing them out to patients. So we gave them a ton.
And then we said, give these out to patients so they would know when to come to the hospital if they needed to come to the hospital again. But yeah, I mean, it was... The entire company was amazing, and we really just were working 24 hours a day for quite some time, for, what, two years, year and a half?
Wow. I mean, it's just, I think for anyone who's listening, they have to feel so inspired by what you've created by...
Knowing that one moment, one observation of something can end up changing the trajectory of your whole life where you build something and have a robust team, but also that you're continuing to pivot to the needs of what the company wants and also outplaying and over-delivering on what the expectation is, even for your investors. And so speaking of that, what was it like to take FIGS public? Yeah.
It was awesome. It was honestly a lot of work. I think to be able to get to a place of like, okay, we are taking our company public is an incredible milestone. Even though it's, I mean, it is grueling. It is very difficult. And it looks easy, obviously, from the outside, right? Oh, you made tailored scrubs. You had a great brand. Oh, you went public. First female founders go public. Great.
But there have been like... you know, major hardships along the way. And there still are, right?
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