Trina Spear and Heather Hasson say FIGS spent $40 million to beat an $800 million lawsuit

Trina Spear and Heather Hasson said on How I Built This that FIGS spent $40 million fighting an $800 million lawsuit from Strategic Partners and went to trial because they believed the claims were ridiculous. The FIGS founders said the jury ultimately ruled in their favor, after a fight they now describe as both financially absurd and clarifying.

That is the line from the episode that should make every founder briefly stare into the middle distance. Not the IPO. Not the Forbes list whiplash. Not even the idea that scrubs needed a glutes strategy, though yes, apparently they did. The wildest part of the FIGS story is that the company built a brand around making nurses and doctors look less like they were wearing cafeteria curtains, then had to spend a fortune proving it had not somehow faked the whole thing.

The business case, as Trina Spear tells it, was almost insultingly clear. Healthcare workers had to wear uniforms. Most hospitals were not buying those uniforms for them. The existing retail experience sounded like a medical supply closet had swallowed a strip mall.

Healthcare uniforms, healthcare apparel is mandated. You have to wear them to go to work every day. But the hospitals weren’t paying for them. And the healthcare professionals were on their own to go buy them.

That was the opportunity. Sell directly to the people actually wearing the clothes, instead of begging hospital administrators or distributors to care about fit, fabric, pockets, and dignity. It sounds obvious now, which is how every good business story is legally required to sound after the fact. At the time, investors apparently treated fashionable scrubs like someone had pitched a premium fax machine.

The old scrub world noticed

Guy Raz brings up the lawsuit from Strategic Partners, which he says owned scrub brands including Cherokee and Dickies. According to the founders, the case accused FIGS of false claims and stealing trade secrets. Their read is blunt: the old industry saw the new one getting traction and reached for lawyers.

their whole strategy is litigation, not innovation.

That is a very founder-brained sentence, and also possibly true enough to sting. Incumbents do not usually send a handwritten note that says, dear disruptor, we are frightened by your unit economics. They sue, discount, copy, acquire, or wait for you to run out of oxygen. FIGS, by then, had oxygen. It had sales, a community of healthcare professionals, and eventually public-company resources. That matters, because the founders’ noble refusal to settle came with a price tag that would kill most startups before lunch.

I think you have to think about the cost of doing business. So we were being sued for, I believe it was $800 million, right? So if we’re going to spend 40 or 60, that’s absolutely worth it because we knew we were going to win because we just did. We knew we were going to win because what they were suing us for was just ridiculous.

Here is the verdict: the claim is credible as an account of how FIGS experienced the lawsuit, but the lesson is less portable than the founders make it sound. Yes, a jury win can become brand armor. Yes, refusing to settle can signal that you are not available for corporate hazing. But “spend $40 million and hold your nerve” is not advice. It is a privilege with invoices.

Heather Hasson and Spear are savvy enough to know that. Their story is not really that litigation builds character. It is that a challenger brand in healthcare can be forced to defend its right to exist in the most American way possible, through depositions, billable hours, and a hotel stay in Santa Ana.

The founder myth gets a legal bill

The episode keeps returning to the same emotional math. FIGS went from selling scrubs out of a car to becoming a multibillion-dollar public company, then watched its stock rise and crash and rise again. Spear jokes about being on a wealth list one year and falling off it the next. The lawsuit sits inside that volatility like a stress fracture. It tests whether the community story was real, whether the board would back the founders, and whether the company could keep selling optimism while being dragged through court.

We met the jury. We had a jury and we met them and they were crying and just saying how sorry they were that we went through this.

That is the movie version, and it is effective. The scrappy founders, the incumbent villain, the tearful jury. But the darker version is more useful. If FIGS is right, then old categories do not stay old because nobody has ideas. They stay old because the first company with a good idea may have to survive everyone who liked the category better when it was ugly, fragmented, and easy to control.

If you don’t have money, I don’t know how you do it. Um, it’s awful.