Heather Hasson
speaker
81 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Heather Hasson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Like, we're all going to die in the sense of not because they don't have scrubs, but because we need to make them feel great.
We need to make them care for the people that are caring for us. That's right. So we can have better patient outcomes.
Oh, I'm not even driven by that. And I should maybe should be a little bit more. But when I started FIGS, right, I think, you know, when I was sitting in hospitals and understanding the landscape of uniforms, right, of scrubs, and I'm sat there for hours and days and months thinking, just studying what they were wearing and why they were wearing it.
Then before I actually did go into this, I'm like, okay, what's the landscape look like? Because I'm just not going to go into something where it's a, you know, if hospitals buy your scrubs for you. But then I realized it was direct to consumer. So nurses and doctors, right, all healthcare professionals, they were purchasing their own scrubs.
So then I'm like, okay, if they're buying their own scrubs, Why are they buying bad scrubs? Right. It's like, okay, they're spending money in their own pocket, right? They're hard-earned money. Yeah. Let's give them something that's better than anything that's out there. For sure. So that was how it all started. And then I met Trina.
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.
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.
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.
I said, right on.
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.
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?
And I would also bring like hot chocolate, like a little thing of hot chocolate or coffee from, you know, Starbucks has those. Yeah, the jug, like the carriers. Yeah, the jugs.
So just take that. Like it was... Scrappy. Very, very. But people were just handing me cash. Wow. And we started getting... And I didn't actually know at the time, but we started getting inquiries saying, these pants don't fit right. And I'm like, okay, that was one email, then another email, then another email. I think this, you know, something about a package.
And then they started sending photographs of the pants, these men. And I'm like, okay. And I'm like, wait a second, what's going on? Why are men sending, you know, pictures of their front of their pants? Like what's happening here? So then I go look. And I checked production and we sewed the women's front panel onto the men's back panel.
So the inseam is tiny, very, very, very short, not comfortable for a dude at all. Right. And so that was a massive production miss. How much did that end up costing you? What did you do with all of it? We didn't have any money, so I had to unsew everything.
Yeah, yeah. I'm like, okay, we have to redo it. So I literally unsew all the pants. Yeah, unstitched it all and reconstructed them. Unstitch every single thing. And whatever we can salvage, we salvaged. But, you know, at that time, I really thought this was like our demise because I'm like, I screwed up royally. Yeah.
And it was actually, it was a funny thing, but it made us really pay attention, obviously, to production. And ever since that incident, our production is our lifeline. It's our North Star. Our quality control is now probably the best in the world. We have so many checks in all our facilities. It's state-of-the-art. So I'm glad it happened when we were... At the beginning.
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