When Trina Spear left Blackstone to sell scrubs out of a car to medical staff during hospital shift changes, most people in her life thought she’d lost it. A Harvard Business School graduate collecting cash on the sidewalk for medical apparel—the gap between the résumé and the reality was hard to explain. But the gap Spear and her cofounder, Heather Hasson, saw in the market was harder to ignore: 18 million health care workers in the US, no brand that existed solely to serve them, and a product experience that hadn’t changed since the 1950s. Twelve years later, Figs is approaching $700 million in annual revenue, is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, and still runs more than 90% of its business direct to consumer through its website. Here, Trina breaks down how obsessive customer understanding became a business model, why she pulled back from conversion-driven marketing, and what she learned from a four-year lawsuit that nearly derailed everything.
On the question that convinced her to leave Wall Street:
Heather asked me what company, what brand, was focused on the people saving lives. And I couldn’t think of one. She’s like, “There are none.” And that just seemed not right. There should be a company that exists solely focused on the people saving lives.
At the time, the industry was all licenses—Dickies, Cherokee, Grey’s Anatomy scrubs, which is literally a license from ABC, the TV network. Those companies were manufacturers selling to distributors, and the distributors were mom-and-pop medical supply stores in strip malls. You’d walk in, there’d be a rack of black, a rack of navy, a rack of white, and a box of scrubs in the middle of the floor to find your size. Next to bedpans and knee braces. It literally looked like 1950, but it was 2012.
And the product itself—you looked like you were wearing a garbage bag to work every day. You’re pinning your wedding ring to your bra strap. You’re holding your pants up in surgery. These people are on 12-hour shifts, sometimes 24 hours, literally saving lives, and nobody had built them a product that actually helped them do their job at the highest level. So that was it for me. How lucky would I be if I got to spend my life showing up for the most amazing people in the world?
On building the feedback loop that became the business model:
We were selling scrubs out of Heather’s car at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. when all the doctors and nurses were changing shifts. We’d say, “What do you love? What do you not like?” We were collecting cash on the sidewalk. That was the first iteration of our direct-to-consumer relationship. It was truly direct.
And that feedback loop isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s the business. The only way to serve anyone at a high standard of excellence is to understand them. So everything flows from that. Where are you holding your surgical scissors? Where are you putting your wedding ring? What kind of zippers do you need to secure your tools? Time was a huge thing we needed to solve for: When you’re not working 12-hour shifts, you’re with your family. You’re not driving to some random store in the middle of nowhere.
Even our ecommerce experience reflects that. We’re not solving for you scrolling and discovering. We’re solving for you getting your uniform so you can go to work and do your job. How do we make that as easy and as quick as possible? That’s a different thing than other companies. And this concept of celebration—the biggest recognition these people get from their job is someone bringing pizza to the break room. That’s “We got your back”? We knew we had to take that to the sky.
On why brand storytelling beats bottom-of-funnel tactics:
Coming out of COVID, we accelerated massively, and then in ’23 and ’24 we had a COVID overhang. Excess inventory, along with every other consumer brand in the world. So we leaned more into conversion-based tactics, bottom-of-funnel marketing, to move through that inventory. It wasn’t a massive shift, but it didn’t feel as amazing as when we do our big storytelling campaigns.
Lo-fi content works for a time. It doesn’t have legs. How many people are going to remember that two years later? Probably nobody. But our International Women’s Day film—telling stories about women in medicine, the triumphs and challenges, the moment where she says “I believe you” to her patient after all these men didn’t—that’s where our sweet spot is. That’s what Figs is all about.
We just launched that film. Over four million views in three days. And it’s not “I watched three seconds and bounced out.” People watched all 90 seconds, which is insane on TikTok and Instagram. It’s because the film is really good. Because you want to know the story. You want to feel something again.
It takes a real successful business model to do that, because you need capital. The return on that top-of-funnel investment takes a longer period of time. But the more we level up to what this brand is about, the more the game changes.
On the thousand no’s that built a real business:
When I told people I was leaving Blackstone to cofound a business to disrupt the scrubs industry, most people in my life—friends, family—were like, “What’s a scrub? You’re going to leave Blackstone to sell scrubs? That’s insane.”
On the investor front, people talk about 100 no’s to get to a yes. I think it was like a thousand no’s to get to a yes. We only ever spent about $10 million in capital. At this point, we’ve generated over $3 billion in revenue and over $400 million in EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization]. We were breakeven by year three or four, and by year six we were off to the races from a profitability standpoint.
That forced us to build a real business. It wasn’t like, “Oh, we’ll just go back to the markets and raise more money if things don’t go well.” And so that’s what drove us to be incredibly capital efficient. We weren’t one of those VC-backed brands that raise hundreds of millions of dollars. We built the company with discipline around growth and profitability from the start.
On refusing to settle—literally:
We were sued for essentially the whole basis of the company. They were saying everything we’d done was a lie. Hundreds of millions of dollars, not just the company but me and Heather personally. It was a four-year lawsuit that ended in a three-and-a-half-week trial.
There’s so much pressure when you’re in these situations to settle. Companies get sued all the time, and the standard move is you let the lawyers deal with it and you settle. There were times all the way leading up to jury selection where we were like, maybe we should. But my board was like, “No. If we know we didn’t do anything wrong, we need to prove it for the rest of time that you can’t mess with Figs.”
This company had sued a whole slew of companies before us. Many of them went out of business. They used litigation to take companies out. We were the first company to say, “That’s not going to happen. You’re not going to bully us.” We spent four years fighting them, went up against the Goliath of the industry, and won. They went bankrupt after that. The CEO got fired.
Standing up for integrity isn’t just standing up for yourself when something’s not right. It’s standing up against someone doing something wrong so it doesn’t happen to somebody else.
On her cofounder’s advice during the trial:
We were sitting there for hours in court, and Heather cannot sit still that long. She was drawing during the closing argument. And she turned to me and said, “Chisel, chisel.” I was like, “What do you mean?” She said, “It’s like Michelangelo—he chiseled to create the David, and in the end it was a masterpiece. That’s what’s happening right now. We’re just being chiseled, and what comes out on the other end—we’re going to win.”
I think people should think about that. When bad stuff is happening, you’re just being crafted into who you’re meant to be on the other side. And Figs is still being chiseled. It’s always a bit imperfect, but that’s what makes it so beautiful. It’s messy. It’s a little unhinged at times. But that’s what makes it so great.
On the “fixed isms” framework for staying on course:
I actually have a framework for this. The “why” and a lot of the “what” can’t change, but the “how” can. Why we’re showing up every day, who we’re serving—those are fixed. A lot of the “what” is fixed. But how we get there? I’m pretty flexible on that.
We actually put them on the board; we call them “Figs-isms.” When I’ve hired new executives and they come in wanting to change everything, I need to give them a framework. These things you cannot touch. We’ve had a designer come in and say, “I’m going to change how we do color drops.” No, you’re not. That’s a Figs-ism.
But bring me a new process. Bring me better execution. You can modify the “how” all day. Just never shift the “why.”
On why she’s maniacal about getting 1% better every day:
I love feedback. I love criticism. I don’t internalize all of it because some of it’s nonsense—so you’ve got to be like, “Nope, that’s not real.” But then there’s the nugget that’s like, “OK, I’m going to take that and get better.”
My whole thing is: If you can get 1% better every single day, imagine what you could do in the next 20 years. I’m maniacal about that—continuously improving as a person, as a CEO, as a leader. How do you believe in someone more than they believe in themselves? We do that for our community, but my job is also to do that for the team.
Some people think I’m stubborn. What they don’t realize is I listen more than they think. But I’m super proud that we haven’t pivoted. Some companies are proud of the pivot. I’m proud that we haven’t. Be the person who does the things others aren’t willing to do. That’s 90% of it: showing up and having that attitude.
Hear more from Trina on Shopify Masters, including how she and Heather navigated going public during COVID, the inseam swap that taught them quality control the hard way, and what it really means to build a brand that never loses sight of the people wearing it.
