What I Actually Do as COO of a Scrub Brand
For the first eighteen months of Eipnare, every blog post here was signed "The Eipnare Team." That was honest — most posts went through two or three of us trading drafts in a shared doc. But by the time we hit our second product line, the byline stopped doing useful work. Readers kept asking the same question in different ways: who is "the team," and which of you actually decided this?
So we switched the byline to a real person. That person is me. Before you read anything else on this blog, I think it's worth knowing who wrote it.
I joined Eipnare when the company first showed up on Amazon, in early 2024. There was no Shopify site yet, no blog, no 24-color always-in-stock model. What existed was one product listing, a handful of reviews, and a customer Q&A thread that I read every entry of, twice. A lot of what I know about scrub buyers I learned from that thread before I learned it anywhere else.
The job has grown — we have a real product line, a real site, a fit team — but the habit hasn't. The day a new SKU goes live, I still read every Amazon review front to back. Bad ones first.
Three things on my desk this quarter
Product communication. I write the copy on every product page, and I rewrite it after every fit review. The V-Neck Jogger description has been through eleven versions since launch. Most rewrites came from sitting in on tester calls and noticing that the word we used on the page didn't match the word the tester used about the garment. We wrote "Stretchy." They said "Doesn't fight me when I bend." The page reads the second one now.
Customer understanding. This started on Amazon in 2024. I read every review and every Q&A. That's where I first noticed how often the word "pockets" came up — and how often a complaint, not a compliment, followed it. The structured nurse interviews are the next level: 60 of them between October 2025 and January 2026, another specialty-specific round running in Q3 this year. Each interview is 30 minutes, $40, handwritten notes (typing makes me record what I already think instead of what I'm hearing). The findings from the first round killed our 9-pocket cargo SKU before we ordered fabric. I'd been the loudest internal voice for that SKU. The interviews proved me wrong, and I'd rather be wrong before the fabric order than after.
Editorial. Every post on this blog goes through me. Sometimes I write it. Sometimes someone else drafts and I edit. The rule I hold the line on came from our founder when we started: nothing reads like a press release, no closing paragraph re-summarizes the article, no sentence sounds like the About page of any other scrub brand. If a sentence could appear on any DTC brand's site for any product, it doesn't ship.
What I don't do
A short list, because it matters:
I'm not the designer. Our patternmaker and our fit team build the garments. I argue with them about specifics — the new Jogger waistband took four rounds — but the final cut is theirs, and the credit for what fits well goes to them.
I'm not the sourcing lead. Our operations partner runs the mill relationships in Guangzhou. I've been in two of the factories. I'm useful in those rooms for about an hour before I'm out of my depth.
I'm not a nurse. Nobody at Eipnare is. The reason we pay 60 nurses for their time and read every line of every transcript is that I can't pretend to know what hour 8 of a 12-hour shift feels like. I'd rather work from their data than from my guesses.
Why a real byline and not "the team"
One practical reason, one principled one.
The practical reason is search. Google has gotten better at noticing blogs where nobody specific is accountable — programmatic content with no human behind it. A real byline tied to a real LinkedIn is a small but measurable trust signal. We added it for the same reason we publish our fabric lab results: so a reader has a way to check us.
The principled reason is simpler. If I get something wrong on this blog, I want the complaint to land in my inbox, not in a contact form. The byline is partly a promise that I'll reply.
What to expect from this blog going forward
A few things I plan to keep doing:
- Specific numbers and named brands. If we compare our fabric to FIGS, we say FIGS. If we run a study, we give the sample size and the dates. Vague benchmarks aren't evidence.
- Honest negatives. Every post we publish has a "where we're not as good" section, and it'll stay that way. New brands die more often from over-claiming than from under-claiming.
- No clinical advice. The day we write about anything that touches actual nursing practice — compression sock interactions, infection-control fabric properties, anything that crosses into medical territory — I'll bring in a registered nurse contributor and put their byline next to mine. I'm not qualified to write that alone and I won't pretend I am.
That's the job. If you've read this far and want to push back on something, my email is on the contact page and my LinkedIn is at the bottom of every post. I read both.
— Hedy
Hedy Nie is COO of Eipnare. Read more about Hedy or connect on LinkedIn.