*** UPDATE: JURY FULLY REJECTS SPI’S MERITLESS LAWSUIT AGAINST FIGS ***

Why FIGS is Fighting SPI’s Lawsuit

For years, the healthcare apparel market was stagnant, dominated by legacy companies that spurned innovation and failed to meet the needs of the incredible healthcare professionals who care for us every day. FIGS saw the need for innovation and transformed the industry by bringing comfort, function, and style directly to healthcare professionals—who we call “Awesome Humans.”

While our disruption of the industry has improved the lives of healthcare professionals, one legacy player—Strategic Partners, Inc. (SPI), which also goes by the name Careismatic Brands—views us as a threat to its existence. Having given up on trying to fairly compete with us, SPI chose to file a baseless lawsuit to try to slow us down from serving the healthcare community.

But make no mistake: We’re not in court because of any wrongdoing. We’re in court because of what we are doing right—bringing healthcare apparel into the 21st century.

DON’T TAKE OUR WORD FOR IT; JUST LOOK AT SPI’S OWN DOCUMENTS

We can’t describe SPI’s motivation for attacking FIGS any better than SPI’s own internal documents. Those documents, produced as part of its lawsuit and available on the public docket, colorfully describe how SPI came to view FIGS as a threat to its prior dominance in the marketplace. SPI’s CEO and other executives consistently describe their own business model as “years behind” FIGS’, expressing concern that the gap “will only grow larger” because customers find their web site “old school” and “frustrating,” while “FIGS marketing is so damn good.”

SPI’s third-party retail partners echoed these concerns, lamenting that FIGS’ apparel is “much more form fitting” and has a “clean modern aesthetic surrounded by a perception of luxury, exclusivity and better quality.” They pressured SPI by telling it that FIGS’ marketing “is becoming a problem,” that their “frustration is coming up with good material like FIGS,” that they lacked “really good marketing videos and images of [SPI’s products], things comparable to Figs,” that SPI’s product collection “sadly needs a REFRESH,” and that they needed “‘Figs-like’ material as fast as [SPI] can create it.”

Confronted with this reality, Mike Singer, SPI’s then CEO (who has since been terminated), summed it best when he said: “We are getting our asses kicked.”

But instead of focusing on helping healthcare professionals and improving the quality of its products and marketing, SPI and its partners discussed how they could “[h]inder FIGS’ ability to secure funding”, “create skepticism among FIGS investors and cause them to pull back”, and “drive Figs OUT!”

After seeing continued signs of FIGS’ success, Singer wondered in one email: “How do we attack them?”

With a frivolous lawsuit, as it turns out. SPI’s goal is abundantly clear: to attack, harass and try to slow down FIGS and its ability to serve healthcare professionals.

THIS LAWSUIT IS PART OF SPI’S PLAYBOOK AGAINST COMPETITORS

It is by now common knowledge that SPI has habitually tried to push anyone it deems a competitive threat out of business by draining their resources through endless legal maneuvers. SPI filed a similar suit against another emerging competitor, Vestegen, but a California jury rejected SPI’s claims as meritless. A third victim of SPI, Koi Design was forced into bankruptcy after they could not afford to pay the legal fees required to take on SPI’s claims.

So, what is SPI saying about us? Their case focuses on the details of FIGS’ founding and our marketing practices. Let’s consider each claim and refute them in turn.

THE CENTERPIECE OF SPI’S CASE HAS COLLAPSED AND BEEN DISMISSED BY THE COURT

The centerpiece of SPI’s case, and the one designed to generate salacious headlines, was that our co-founder Trina Spear somehow obtained and exploited SPI’s confidential business plan to build FIGS. We have maintained from the start that this assertion was egregiously false, and on August 10, 2021, the court dismissed this part of SPI’s case and refused to grant them an opportunity to amend and resubmit that claim.

This claim was always baseless. SPI had multiple years of a scorched earth discovery process to find evidence for their accusation, but they could not produce a single piece of “stolen confidential information.” That is because there isn’t any.

FIGS has never modeled itself after SPI, and the two businesses are diametrically distinct. SPI takes commoditized scrubs that it licenses from third parties and sells them through brick-and-mortar stores they don’t own. Their website is essentially just a store locator. FIGS, on the other hand, develops its own premium healthcare apparel and lifestyle products and sells them directly to healthcare professionals through its own digitally native, direct-to-consumer platform.

Ironically, while SPI failed to provide the court with any supposedly stolen confidential information, SPI’s own documents reveal numerous pleas by Singer to copy FIGS—our products, our marketing, and our branding. As just one example, Singer asked another SPI executive: “How long will it take for ours to be as good as theirs? Can we map the features of their site and build ours to beat them?”

SPI’s retailers also begged SPI to copy FIGS’s approach to online sales:

“Yes, Figs has great marketing . . . but they also have a SHOP button (huge)!! Our potential customers scrolling on Facebook are seeing Figs ads and at an IMPULSE they are pushing the SHOP BUTTON. Before you know it…BOOM, their shopping HIGH/URGE/CRAVING was completed and their cart was paid for! . . . My question is, COULD you create a SHOP BUTTON?” 

The collapse of SPI’s core claim, capped off by the court’s dismissal “without leave to amend” should make crystal clear the weakness of SPI’s case and their underhanded motives for pursuing it. That’s more proof of what we said from the start: this case is baseless.

SPI PUTS THE FALSE IN FALSE ADVERTISING CLAIMS

Next, SPI accuses FIGS of false advertising. Specifically, SPI claims (1) that we made false statements about the performance features of our products, and (2) that we lied about our philanthropic initiatives.

Let’s take those two in order. First, on the performance claims about our products, FIGS’ marketing is accurate. For example, SPI claims that FIGS’ scrubs are not antimicrobial, but they are. FIGS scrubs are treated with a well-known antimicrobial treatment called Silvadur. Silvadur’s website explains in great detail how its antimicrobial treatment works. And as we shared with the court, FIGS has test reports across all our fabric production showing that our fabric reduced surface bacteria by 99% through the independent standard AATCC TM-100 test method.

Similarly, SPI alleges that FIGS falsely claimed our “scrub fabric is literally made of silver.” However, there are multiple problems with this argument: (1) the Silvadur antimicrobial treatment used by FIGS does contain silver; and (2) SPI even conceded in its own court documents that when it performed its own testing, “particles of silver were detected on the FIGS scrubs’ fabric.”

What about SPI’s charge that we lied about our philanthropy? It, too, is outrageous and unsupported.

Giving back to the healthcare community is ingrained in everything we do at FIGS, as it has been from the beginning. When we started FIGS, we created an initiative called Threads for Threads to donate scrubs to healthcare professionals who work in resource-poor countries and lack the proper uniforms to do their jobs safely. By providing clean scrubs to these individuals, we aim to empower them and improve the quality of care they provide. To date, we have donated hundreds of thousands of FIGS scrubs and other products to healthcare professionals in need. Here are just a sampling of photos and videos from the many giving trips that FIGS has participated in.

Amazingly, SPI would have people believe that Threads for Threads is simply a fiction and that these giving trips and years of philanthropy just never happened. As countless members of the FIGS team and our healthcare community can attest from their own personal involvement, this claim is both offensive and ridiculous.

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While SPI would like us to just go away, we will not allow its baseless attacks to distract us from celebrating, empowering and serving healthcare professionals. That is our mission, and part of fulfilling it means standing up for the truth.