Trina Spear
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How I Built This with Guy Raz · FIGS: Trina Spear and Heather Hasson. The $2.5 Billion Scrubs…
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Why Is Net Worth Not the Same as Self-worth?
Trina Spear says net worth is not self-worth, and a founder cannot tie either one to a stock price. After Figs went public the shares hit $50 in the first month, and she and Heather Hasson made a Forbes list of wealthy women. The next year the stock was $5 and they were the two women who fell off. Guy Raz says the two of them were worth hundreds of millions on paper. They have taken money off the table and can support their families. That security is not what gets them up.
The company value moved with the stock. Spear calls it an $8 billion company, then a $400 million company, a $600 million company, and later a $2 billion company. Guy Raz puts the market cap at $2.4 billion and says Figs
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Why Did Figs Go Public in May 2021?
Trina Spear says Figs went public in May 2021 because the company should be a public company, not because 2020 was a year to cash in. Figs had scale and a disciplined approach to revenue and profit, and one investor would eventually need liquidity. They brought 150 healthcare professionals to the New York Stock Exchange, and those professionals rang the opening bell.
The listing came while COVID was still reshaping the business. Isolation gowns and other protective gear were donations. Figs did not sell them. The company did sell masks, including N95s and its own Figs masks, after shifting the supply chain to suppliers who could make that gear. A shipping container went from about $35 to ab
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How Much Did Figs Spend Fighting a Lawsuit?
Heather Hasson says Figs spent $40 million fighting a lawsuit she puts at $800 million, and that the money was worth spending because she and Trina Spear expected to win.
Guy Raz says the case closed in early 2022 after a three-year fight, and the jury ruled for the two founders. Lawyers sometimes pushed to settle. A deal for $2 million, with nothing admitted, is one they probably would have taken, and that offer was not on the table. The board, already seated because Figs was public, refused to let the case sit and chose a trial. Hasson says the claim was ridiculous, and that they won because Figs was innovative, put out a strong product, and ran a strong business. The cash was only part o
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Why Did Thomas Tull Invest in Figs?
Trina Spear says Thomas Tull invested in the Figs seed round and the Series A, then in 2017 bought out the other investors. An investor had told her and Heather Hasson in 2014 or 2015 to meet Tull, who ran the movie studio Legendary Entertainment, in case Figs scrubs could get into movies. They did not think a movie placement was the point, but they were trying everything. Tull talked about old industries that, as Spear retells it, he described as run by the mafia. She says he was not describing medical apparel that way. He pointed to what Uber did with taxis, and to industries that had not brought in technology or strong builders. He said Figs was doing that work in medical apparel, and he
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Why Did Investors Reject Figs?
Trina Spear and Heather Hasson say investors turned Figs down about three to four hundred times. The raise was life or death for the company, so they treated a slow or unsure reply as a no and kept pitching.
The reasons were blunt. Investors said nobody cares how a healthcare worker looks, because the job comes with blood and liquids. They also said the market was not big enough. Guy Raz put their figure back to them as about 20 million people in the United States, and the answer was still that it was too small. Spear and Hasson say a market that size is the wrong business to back. The opportunity is to create the market.
The money that did come was from contrarian investors who believed i
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Why Do Figs Scrubs Cost Only a Little More?
Trina Spear says Figs spent about double what rival scrub makers spent on the product and still charged only about 15 to 20 percent more.
Those companies sold through distributors and paid licensing fees. She says 60 percent of the price went to the retailer and 8 to 12 percent of the retail price went to the license holder, so very little was left to make a better scrub. Figs sold straight to the person wearing the clothes. With no middlemen, a product that cost about twice as much could still land only a little above the old price.
That is the price-to-value bet. Healthcare workers were already buying their own scrubs, and a better fit did not have to cost twice as much as the scrubs the
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How Did Trina Spear Sell Scrubs Out of a Car?
Trina Spear says Heather Hasson told her that working together meant selling scrubs out of the car. Spear was still at Blackstone and came to Los Angeles on weekends. The two of them stood on the sidewalk outside emergency rooms at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., when doctors and nurses changed shifts.
Hasson wanted a product she called technical comfort: tops and pants with stretch, soft enough for a long shift, in colors she thought healthcare workers should have, including graphite and the heather gray of business slacks. Spear used those mornings to learn what people loved about their scrubs, what they hated, where they kept tools, and which pockets they needed. They also sold a lot of sets. Before
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How Did Figs Start Selling Scrubs?
Heather Hasson says Figs started selling scrubs out of her car in emergency rooms, after a short path from a favor to a product.
In 2010 in Los Angeles she bought fabric off the shelf, made a pattern, hired a sewer, and sewed about 30 sets. They were forest green with a bright yellow Figs label. She sent them to a couple of clinics and did not think of it as a company. The shift came over coffee with a nurse practitioner. Hasson asked what her friend was wearing and called the scrubs garbage. In college anatomy, scrubs were one size, so she had worn extra-large ones and rolled them up. She drove to strip-mall scrub stores, found the same clothes, and tailored a pair. The friend, who worked
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How Did a Trip to Kenya Lead Heather Hasson to Figs?
Heather Hasson says a trip to northern Kenya is what led her to Figs. Her handbag business had collapsed after her partner died of lung cancer. She had no money and no plan, so she went to clear her head. Travel was cheap. In school after school, teachers said children stayed home because they had no uniforms. A child put in a uniform goes to school with a different mentality, and that stayed with her.
Back in Los Angeles she had a few thousand dollars. Tie cloth is small next to the fabric for pants, so she made bow ties, neckties, and scarves in silk and wool. A job at Theodore in Malibu paid $9 an hour and bought what material she could afford. She sold the ties through a website, trunk
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How Did Figs Ship Its First Orders?
Guy Raz says that in early 2013 Trina Spear left Blackstone, moved to Los Angeles, and she and Heather Hasson shipped Figs orders from the apartment they shared.
They cleared the living room of a two-bedroom apartment and stacked the scrubs there in light plastic bags. The bags slid, so Spear sorted colors and sizes before anything went out. They called that living room a warehouse and used Shopify to send the orders.
The first units were not all made in one place. They tried production in Los Angeles, in China, and in Vietnam, hit a quality problem, and came back to Los Angeles to get the fit right before sending the work overseas again. Hasson spent long stretches in dye houses, factorie
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How Much Did Trina Spear Invest in Scrubs?
Trina Spear put $70,000 into the scrubs company, half of a $140,000 retirement account she liquidated while she was still paying off business school debt.
The cash was her commitment to Heather Hasson, who had already done a lot before Trina got involved. Cashing out the account was a horrible tax decision, and the hit was 50% of everything. Heather had the company up and running, and they agreed on an equity split both felt good about. Heather is a creative genius, and her equity was greater than Trina's, in line with what was fair and with what had already been built. If the company failed, they both lose, and if it succeeded, they both win. Trina had gone to Harvard Business School and w
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Why Do Most Medical Workers Buy Their Own Scrubs?
Trina Spear says most healthcare workers buy their own scrubs because hospitals were not paying for them. The uniform is required for the job, and 85% of healthcare professionals buy it themselves. They reorder the same clothes again and again, so the business is replenishment driven. It is not a holiday season, and healthcare jobs hold up in a recession.
She put the United States healthcare apparel market at about $10 billion when she looked, and over $12 billion now, inside an $80 billion industry worldwide. The buyer pool is 24 million healthcare professionals in the United States and 140 million around the world. Companies were not selling to those workers. They sold through distributor
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What Happened When Figs Stock Fell From 50 to 5?
Trina Spear and Heather Hasson say they fell off a Forbes list of wealthy women the year after Figs stock went from $50 to $5. They had made the list when the shares were worth a lot, and the next year they were the two women no longer on it.
Figs was an $8 billion company, then a $400 million company, then a $600 million company, and later a $2 billion company. The same fortunes were rewritten as the stock moved.
They call those changes transient. A founder cannot tie self-worth, let alone net worth, to any of the numbers. They had just said the shares were worth a lot of money, and then that the whole thing was too fleeting to live inside.