"Moxie Scrubs" with Alicia Tulsee

Nurses were a big part of the frequent medical care Alicia Tulsee’s family needed. This led to conversations about how uncomfortable, expensive and ill-fitting were the work clothes available to nurses. Moxie Scrubs was founded to solve that problem. Don’t miss this great conversation with a compelling founder.

Alicia Tulsee of Moxie Scrubs

Highlights:

  • Sal Daher Introduces Alicia Tulsee

  • Moxie Scrubs: What It's Solving

  • "' ... no one's created a brand for nurses and nurses have been shopping online since they received their first paycheck. This the future of the market ... '"

  • The Future of Moxie Scrubs

  • Alicia's Immigrant Founder Story

  • "... I actually started my first business at 19 ... Going online and early days of eBay, I found wholesalers that were selling costume jewelry and purses and handbags and things like that. I said, "Oh, man, if I can buy this stuff and resell it, I can make more money than what I would be earning on an hourly wage at the mall ...'"

  • Advice to the Audience

 

Moxie Scrubs

Guest: Alicia Tulsee

Sal Daher: I'm really proud to say that the Angel Invest Boston Podcast is sponsored by Purdue University entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson. Purdue is exceptional in its support of its faculty, faculty of its top five engineering school, in helping them get their technology from the lab out to the market, out to industry, out to the clinic. Peter Fasse is also a great support to entrepreneurs. He is a patent attorney specializing in microfluidics and has been tremendously helpful. Some of the startups which I'm involved, including a startup, came out of Purdue Savran technologies. I'm proud to have these two sponsors for my podcast.

Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting founders and angels. Today, we are privileged to have with us Alicia Tulsee, founder of Moxie Scrubs. Say hi to our audience, Alicia.

Sal Daher Introduces Alicia Tulsee

Alicia Tulsee: Hi everyone. It's such a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me, Sal

Sal Daher: Alicia is a graduate of Harvard College, and I saw her pitch at Walnut Ventures. Boy, can she pitch, very impressed. Anyway, this is not the usual type of startup that is on the podcast because we tend to skew towards technology startups, but I think this is very interesting, and you're going to find Alicia very compelling founder. What is the problem that Moxie Scrubs is solving?

Moxie Scrubs: What It's Solving

Alicia Tulsee: Actually, medical apparel is a huge market, and I was so surprised to learn that nurses are the largest segment of the healthcare workforce and the fastest growing segment of our healthcare workforce, and no one actually had given nurses a brand of their own until now. Nurse scrubs is a $5 billion industry, and the problem is that nurses don't like their scrubs. Most scrubs don't fit well, are not sized, or price inclusive, and is inconvenient to buy, and about 40% of the market is still just poor quality. For Moxie Scrubs, we actually worked with nurses to design the scrubs that they want to wear, and we focused on inclusive sizing and actually have a patent pending IP that guarantees that our scrubs are the highest performing scrubs in the market.

Sal Daher: Interesting. How do you measure performance?

Alicia Tulsee: Two things. With over 6,000 customers since launching Q2 last year, we have just a 2% order return rate. We know that nurses love our fit. They love the product. Actually, this year, a nurse discovered us and ran the Boston Marathon in our scrubs.

Sal Daher: Oh, my goodness.

Alicia Tulsee: She crushed a Guinness world record for fastest marathon in a nurse's uniform. She's actually an Olympic qualifier.

Sal Daher: Oh, wow, my goodness. Wow, nurses are on their feet all day, so I imagine they have to have pretty good endurance. The grueling hours in the hospital and so on. What is the usual return rate for that type of garment?

Alicia Tulsee: Actually, in traditional apparel online e-commerce, which we are a direct-to-consumer business, it's 30% to 40%.

Sal Daher: Wow, so you had 2% versus 30% to 40%, which is a standard of the market. That is impressive. You have 6,000 customers already. What are the metrics of attraction? Does it make sense for you to share?

Alicia Tulsee: Happy to share. Again, since launching just Q2 last year, we've done $800,000 in sales almost organically. We kicked off paid marketing last quarter, and now we're actually seeing scalable metrics with a low $25 to $55 customer acquisition cost, a $90 to $105 average order value. Right now, 60% of our revenue are repeat purchases.

Sal Daher: Ah, my goodness. That is something

Alicia Tulsee: [chuckles] Thanks.

Sal Daher: How did you get cottoned on to this opportunity?

Alicia Tulsee: Really interesting. Growing up, my dad was really ill and my aunt on my mom's side was actually chronically ill. I used to spend a lot of time going in and out of the hospital with them. My aunt, almost every other time I would visit her, it was in the hospital. That's how sick she was.

Sal Daher: Oh, my.

Alicia Tulsee: I was always just interacting with nurses. A nurse would come into the room and just put you at ease. You would trust them right away, and they always ended up being this liaison between my family, me, the patient, my relative, or the doctor. This is what really drew me into healthcare. I actually did my degree in economics from Harvard School of Continuing Education. I did economics because, one, I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur and that would be a great field of study to understand how marketing impacts commerce.

Also, when you look at socioeconomic disparities and women's health, you can really look at macroeconomics and the way businesses and countries impact each other. I thought that economics was a great field to start with because then you can get into government and policy that helps impact healthcare.

Sal Daher: Basically, you spent a lot of time with nurses. You get very close to them. How did they open up to you? How did you figure out that they had a problem with their scrubs?

Alicia Tulsee: I actually interviewed hundreds of nurses when I had the idea. Once I saw that no one actually created a brand dedicated to nurses, I said, "That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to make the first brand for nurses." The more I spoke to nurses, the more I learned how seriously underserved nurses are in general in healthcare, but also, the opportunity to give these caregivers something better. That's how we came up with the pending patent IP around the construction of our garment.

Because nurses complained that fit was the biggest problem, not looking and feeling respectable because it wouldn't fit well, it would be baggy giving you lower confidence. Then I saw how fragmented nursing is as a profession. It's such a vast field to get into, the travel nursing, you can be an oncology nurse, you can be a pediatric nurse, for example. I saw that there was this huge need for community among nurses.

Sal Daher: Very true.

Alicia Tulsee: There was no single one place for nurses to go to.

Sal Daher: Do you have products for male nurses as well sector of the population or is that to come?

Alicia Tulsee: It's been in the works ever since we launched. We had a lot of supply chain setbacks during the pandemic, so we hope to actually bring that live next year. Actually, 92% of nurses are women, so we launched with the female products first and continue to work on the male product simultaneously.

Sal Daher: I'll never forget a male nurse. My dad was in the intensive care unit at MGH. And this intensive care nurse that he had was a guy from Lebanon. He says to me, "Saleh, your father speaks Arabic with an accent from Akkar, the north of Lebanon." I say, "Exactly. That's where his family's from." I'll never forget that, this guy telling the story. It's funny because my father was never in Lebanon. He learned his Arabic from his grandmother growing up. By the way, she used to inspect his clothes. When he was 12 years old, he's in the bathtub, and she goes to his clothes, and she finds a cigarette and she says, "Saleh, I understand you have been smoking cigars." "Oh no, no, no grandmother. Only cigarettes."

Anyway, she spoke with an accent from the north of Lebanon, the hillsides up in the north. That makes me think of male nurses in scrubs. Excellent. Yes, I can believe a huge demand for well-designed nurses' scrubs, but how is it that you find the nurses in a way that is economical? It's a very developed market. The nurse can go and pick up seemingly very cheap scrubs online, whatever, and then discover that they don't fit, and they have to return 30%, 40% of the time. How do you break through all that noise?

"' ... no one's created a brand for nurses and nurses have been shopping online since they received their first paycheck. This the future of the market ... '"

Alicia Tulsee: My background originally is from nonprofits, and then also the music industry. What I learned early on in my career was how to build community. Whether it's around a cause or around the brand. When I look at nurses, nurses are part of so many peer-oriented groups. There's so many nursing associations, for example. I went to them first, and that was how when we launched last year, we actually launched with the partnership with the American Nurses Association.

Sal Daher: So clever. Very clever. Gosh.

Alicia Tulsee: We built the community from grassroots marketing up. That's what we're looking to do when we kick off our seed-raise at the end of the holidays is to now scale everything up and get more nurses in Moxies.

Sal Daher: That is awesome. By the way, Moxie Scrub, it's such a great brand.

Alicia Tulsee: Thanks.

Sal Daher: This brand name. I love it. How about the production? I understand you have some partnerships that have allowed you to not have to start from scratch.

Alicia Tulsee: That's right. You remember well. [chuckles]

Sal Daher: Look, I didn't invest in your startup because I don't invest outside of life sciences anymore. I'm just focused on life science investing. Let me tell you, your pitch at Walnut was so compelling. You were very, very impressive.

Alicia Tulsee: Oh my gosh. Thank you. You remember. Actually, When I looked at the market 80% of medical apparels actually purchased through brick-and-mortar retail. That's because majority of the manufacturers can't sell direct to consumer due to channel conflicts. Their customers are the mom-and-pop uniform stores around the country and the wholesaler and distributors. Knowing that, I actually went to these manufacturers and said, "Direct-to-consumer is where the market's going, and I know you can't sell direct due to your channel conflicts, but no one's created a brand for nurses and nurses have been shopping online since they received their first paycheck. This the future of the market."

Sal Daher: They don't want to be doing that when they're off their very demanding schedule.

Alicia Tulsee: That's exactly right. I went to the manufacturers and I said, "I want you to be my first angel investor because I don't want your company on my cap table [laughs].

Sal Daher: Oh my.

Alicia Tulsee: I want to piggyback on your supply chain. I didn't have to build it from scratch and raise $5 million over two years just to build out a strong supply chain. That's how I took the experience of one of these manufacturers who actually then became our first investor and helped me spearhead the business to then have the quality already from the get-go and take their learnings from their wholesale product that they've been selling to make it now this premium brand and quality product that now we've brought to the market.

Sal Daher: How did you get these people to take you seriously? You'd get this crazy lady who's got this idea about, "Where are they in the scrubs business? We know the scrubs business. What do you know from the scrubs business?" How did you get them to take you seriously?

Alicia Tulsee: A degree in economics from Harvard doesn't hurt. [laughs] In the past, I've worked for some big brands. I spearheaded Budweiser's marketing in India after Anheuser-Busch was acquired by InBev. For example, I've made other e-commerce brands or a lot of consumer brands a lot of money in the past. Now, it's time to claim my own segment here and do something with impact.

Sal Daher: Interesting, interesting. Thinking about beer, Budweiser. Budweiser is a lager. Beers are divided into two large subgroups, there are lagers and there're ales.

Alicia Tulsee: That's right.

Sal Daher: Very interesting. I learned this a few months ago. I was astonished to discover that what separates them is the yeast that's used for fermenting.

Alicia Tulsee: Top-fermenting and bottom-fermenting, that's right.

Sal Daher: Top-fermenting with lager and bottom-fermenting with the traditional ale. Ales are very ancient. You know that the yeast that is used for lager beer, apparently originated in Patagonia, south of Argentina. It was probably brought to Europe in the hold of some ship in the 1500s. That's when lager emerged in Germany. It's astonishing that until then, every beer they drank was an ale. Only then did you have a lager, after that you have this yeast that can be fermented, doesn't require heat. It's a different type of fermentation. You have this lite, crisp beer that took over the world. This is a digression. These are fun, the fact that you've been in the beer business. They took you seriously because you're an experienced brand person. By this point, how much have you raised?

Alicia Tulsee: Actually, an article came out in ForbesWomen earlier this year disclosing that amount. [laughs]

Sal Daher: Hotdog. My goodness.

Alicia Tulsee: We raised about just under $2.4 million, but that is going on three years. We really had actually bootstrapped this business since then. I know when you put the money together as our total precede round, it sounds large. Again, it was going on three years now.

Sal Daher: Yes. Raising money is really, really hard. Getting a consumer brand off the ground is phenomenally hard. You have to be so good at execution. You have to have your ducks really lined up because otherwise, you're not in the running. Tremendous.

Alicia Tulsee: Yes. I had the idea in 2019. Started pitching the different manufacturers to make it happen and finally kicked off the business in 2021. All of 2020 was actual product development and raising the capital during the pandemic.

Sal Daher: During the pandemic. Wow, how did the pandemic affect you?

Alicia Tulsee: First three quarters of 2020 was awful. I was just hearing no after no. What I did well was I actually applied to a lot of accelerator programs. We got into MassChallenge.

Sal Daher: Hotdog.

The Future of Moxie Scrubs

Alicia Tulsee: We became part of Ember companies which is a fashion accelerator program almost, but it's free with the life of your company. They give you a lot of great mentorship and resources.

Sal Daher: They don't take equity, MassChallenge. [chuckles]

Alicia Tulsee: MassChallenge doesn't take equity. Then we also made into the Harvard Innovation Lab and we were part of the LX GEO cohort.

Sal Daher: My goodness.

Alicia Tulsee: Then we also did TiE ScaleUp Boston, which is another great accelerator that doesn't take equity.

Sal Daher: Oh, wow. Get a little variety of my sauce. Instead of saying hotdog, I'm going to say chorizo or kielbasa, that's another kind of sausage. Amazing. What's the path going forward for you? Are you expecting to raise money to ramp up the scale now that you've figured out, I suppose, what does the nurses want?

Alicia Tulsee: That's exactly right. We've proven product market fit and that nurses want us, and now we really just need to get out there and reach more nurses. We are going to raise a seed round. We want to kick it off after the holiday growth.

Sal Daher: Where are you located now?

Alicia Tulsee: We're here in Assembly Row in Boston.

Sal Daher: Oh, okay. You're Boston-based, Somerville. That is tremendous.

Alicia Tulsee: I came here like every other person and stayed when they went to college. [laughs]

Sal Daher: Boston has that. It's a funny place. It's a little bit insular, but it's also a very comfortable place to be because these insular types, they can be very helpful when you need help. There's a lot of collaboration in Boston. It's not a friendly town, but it is a town that can give you a lot of support ironically.

Alicia Tulsee: I'm Boston strong. I love it here. I plan to stay here. I'm a proud now Bostonian, and I just can't speak enough wonderful things about the entrepreneurial community here. So many investors, founders, innovators are here, and they're happy to help. All of the progress we've made has been through all of these amazing mentors and connections we've made in Boston.

Sal Daher: That's the culture, groups, volunteering and rolling up their sleeves and helping, that's very much alive. The insular Yankees were insular, but at the same time, they were very collaborative, very much into volunteering and doing things to further the community. Alicia, is there anything else that you want to say about the current state of the business. Because a second half of the podcast, I want to get a little bit into your biography, and how you decided to become an entrepreneur.

Alicia's Immigrant Founder Story

Alicia Tulsee: Our vision and mission is to enhance and inspire the moxie in every nurse and becomes that number one go-to lifestyle brand for nurses that meets all of their needs, life on the shift, after the shiftm and in between. That's what we're here to do is to make it better for nurses. Nurses are at every single touchpoint of the American healthcare system, and the health and wellbeing of our nation is the health and wellbeing of our nurses. We're here to make it better for them.

Sal Daher: They do just heroic work, and I have great, great respect for nurses. I really appreciate it because my father passed away, and we spent a lot of time with them. Lucky they had the care that they had because they lived a lot longer than it would've lived otherwise. They both lived a ripe, old age. They had a few scares along the way. Let me tell you, some amazing nurses did some tremendous things made their lives so much easier along the way. I tell you, nobody could talk me into becoming a nurse. It's so much work. I appreciate them tremendously. Let's do this, first I'm going to do a very brief promo for my podcast. Then afterwards, I want to get your immigrant founder story and also just how you decided to become a founder.

Everybody's been listening to the Angel Invest Boston Podcast. Talk to just amazingly inspiring founders like Alicia Tulsee, founder of Moxie Scrubs, just the best scrubs for nurses. We speak with other founders also with angel investors. The reason that I do this podcast is precisely to help people like Alicia or like angel investors to get inspiration, to get involved in this business of building new companies, usually technology companies. My particular focus is in early stage life science companies, what I'd like to call angel scale biotech. Boston is so full of startups that I can't help but have really compelling people on like Alicia. I saw Alicia pitch at Walnut, and I was just blown away and I said, "Oh, gosh, I've got to have her on the podcast someday."

The purpose here is really to help the startup community flourish. You can help. The way you can help is first subscribe to the podcast. You can find us again. Then number two, you can go to the Apple Podcast app and leave a review. Review is really valuable and at least the rating, but written review really carries much more weight than a rating. Where else would you learn about the difference between lager and ales? This podcast provides information at the most unexpected level. Where else would you meet a personality such as Alicia Tulsee. Anyway, Alicia, where is your family from? Where did you come from?

Alicia Tulsee: I was born and raised in Queens, New York, but both my parents are from Trinidad and Tobago in the West Indies.

Sal Daher: Amazing, Trinidad and Tobago

Alicia Tulsee: For people who don't know where that is, it's actually the country that Nicki Minaj is from.

[laughter]

Sal Daher: Nicki Minaj's country. Yes. Trinidad and Tobago. If I remember correctly, it has a very large oil refinery. That's the major business in Trinidad and Tobago. Your family came up to Queens, New York. You went to school in Queens, and eventually you got into the consumer--

Alicia Tulsee: Actually very interesting. My mother came to this country as a au pair for this well-to-do family, and they were actually Jewish, and I lived with them till I was almost 10 years old. I grew up Christian, Jewish, and then Hindu.

Sal Daher: Oh my goodness.

Alicia Tulsee: Very New York, and my mother is where the entrepreneurial stuff comes from. She had all these different side hustle businesses, and one of them was actually a small cut and sew factory out of our basement. She used to cut and sew for baby Gap in Oshkosh. I was exposed to apparel early on, actually.

Sal Daher: Oh, wow. This is so typical New York City. The parents are in the garment district in New York, and the kid grows up, and then goes to the fashion business. That's a very New York story, but with a Caribbean twist.

Alicia Tulsee: That's right.

Sal Daher: Unusual. Yes.

Alicia Tulsee: Fun fact, Trinidad has the second largest carnival. Brazil is number one. Brazil has the number one carnival, and Trinidad has the second largest.

Sal Daher: We like to think we're number one in carnival and soccer. Although in our World Cup play, it hasn't shown.

Alicia Tulsee: Trinidad, I know my parents were big into cricket, actually.

Sal Daher: Ah, it's like the Dominican Republic, why are there so many baseball players in the Dominican Republic? It'll never be explained because everybody else in Latin America plays soccer except Cuba and the DR. Great, so you had this example of entrepreneurship from your mom, but you went through a corporate career. What got you off the corporate boat?

"... I actually started my first business at 19 ... Going online and early days of eBay, I found wholesalers that were selling costume jewelry and purses and handbags and things like that. I said, "Oh, man, if I can buy this stuff and resell it, I can make more money than what I would be earning on an hourly wage at the mall ...'"

Alicia Tulsee: I wouldn't say that I was only corporate. I actually started my first business at 19. My first job was in the mall at Macy's, working for just retail, selling clothing, and it struck me when somebody bought a $300 pair of juicy couture sweatpants. That was maybe even more than my entire check for the whole week. [chuckles] That really bothered me. Going online and early days of eBay, I found wholesalers that were selling costume jewelry and purses and handbags and things like that. I said, "Oh, man, if I can buy this stuff and resell it, I can make more money than what I would be earning on an hourly wage at the mall."

There was this flea market called the Aqueduct Racetrack, so it was the AquaDuck FleaMarket, and it was the largest flea market in on the East Coast or something at that time. People would actually travel from other states just to come to the flea market for the weekend. I ended up opening up two stalls in this flea market and started making a lot of money for a 19-year-old.

Sal Daher: My goodness. You're a retailing prodigy. You're saying like, "What am I leaving on the table working for an hourly wage?" Man.

Alicia Tulsee: I have the hustle for sure. [chuckles]

Sal Daher: That is great. You wound up that business when you went to college?

Alicia Tulsee: I didn't have this traditional high school, then college path. I ended up going to different schools and trying to figure things out. I went to a fashion school after high school. Dropped out of the fashion program because it wasn't stimulating enough, and then I said, "You know what, I want to get back into science." Then I went and I did pre-med, and that was, again, speaking to just my involvement growing up in healthcare with nurses all the time. I couldn't get in my organic chemistry classes. A year passed, and I still couldn't get into the class. I was like, "I'm not going to finish this degree till I'm done with my 20s at this point." That bugged me because I already understood how short our time is on this planet. I didn't want to waste my prime 20s just inside.

Sal Daher: You dodged a major bullet because being a physician is a very noble profession. My daughter's a physician, but let me tell you, it is a very in-the-box profession. It's just, there's not a lot of room for creativity and for the kind of personality that you have. You would've felt so constrained at medicine. You dodging a bullet there. I think that's a great move.

Alicia Tulsee: I was motivated to help people. Just seeing my ailing relatives, I just saw how important that work is and needed.

Sal Daher: Undoubtedly. Because it's so high stakes, it becomes a very demanding, very heavy profession. Put it this way, there are no minimum viable products in medicine. Not allowed to experiment that do crazy things. You have to be very, very much in the box and according to the rules, because otherwise, people suffer. It requires great sacrifice. The personality like yours that wants to experiment, wants to develop new things and so forth, boy, you either have to be in the cutting edge of research out there, but it's very tough. How did you decide to go and do Extension School at Harvard?

Alicia Tulsee: Actually, I was also a musician. [chuckles] I play guitar.

Sal Daher: You played a guitar on top of that. That's awesome.

Alicia Tulsee: I used to work with a lot of local artists in New York. One of my other jobs was at a music store because I would get this amazing discount on all the equipment. That was my hook to like, "Oh, why pay full price when I can get this great 60% off or something for my equipment as an employee," so I used to work in a music store. I also am Indian origin. My predominant ancestry is from India, but four generations ago. When I was in high school was actually during September 11th, and it was a really hard time for people who looked like me in New York. Even though I was a kid with a backpack, bus drivers would close the door on me and tell me go back to my country.

Sal Daher: Oh my goodness.

Alicia Tulsee: I'm like, "I'm from here. I'm not from the Middle East." That's okay even if you are from the Middle East, you shouldn't do that. I had a lot of early just dealing with relatives who could die any moment to ethnic identity being questioned and facing that type of racism early on. With the money I made from my side business selling in the flea market--

Sal Daher: Entrepreneurship is the best revenge.

Alicia Tulsee: I took this money and I said, "I'm going to go to India. I'm going to go see the country where people look like me." I got an internship with a music publication in India, and that's how I ended up going to India. I worked for Rave Magazine. Two weeks, in I got hired and became the sales manager of the Bangalore office. [laughs] What was supposed to be a year gap turned into now a four-year journey in India. It was amazing. It was then during the 2008, and when the housing recession bubble popped, the US economy was in a bad situation, and the Middle Eastern economy was in a bad situation. These companies from both Europe, the West, Middle East were all coming into India because India's economy was independent of the other economies and was booming.

Because I was working at the magazine and working with all these different alcohol companies that were putting ads in the magazine, they recruited me to start doing events and marketing for them in India. That's how I got the job offer to then come and join Budweiser in 2011. I realized at this point that I can continue on this path, but I didn't really finish a bachelor's degree yet. I had this associate's degree from community college. I said, "Money's always to be made." That's actual thing that entrepreneurs forget and people forget, money's always there to be made, but your time and your investment in yourself is limited.

I said, "I'm going to go back to school and pursue higher education." I left my swanky career in India, and I came back to my mom's couch in Queens. That was really hard. [laughs] I started applying to programs, and that's how I discovered the Extension School. I'm a degree candidate, I have a degree from Harvard. It's actually called the School of Continuing Education. For the extension program, you actually do a certification and stuff.

Sal Daher: That's right. Continuing education because you have all this life experience. I really think that the traditional path of students finishing high school and then going straight to college is just very, very, very poor. I think students gain a tremendous amount from going out, starting a little business, and even failing at it before going to college. Get out of high school, spent two years doing that. When you go to college, you're going to get so much more out of it.

Alicia Tulsee: Agreed. I think what was supposed to be a year gap and turned into a longer gap was the best thing I ever did because it put me on this trajectory.

Sal Daher: My younger daughter was admitted to Cornell. Her own said, "I feel like I want to work. I want to do something." She just went to work as a cashier for a whole year. She'd never worked before. She just deferred her admission. After that year, she really understood much more about the world. She had been in a very academic, very rarefied environment, and she hadn't dealt with people. Being a cashier you, deal with all types of people. You discover the other 64% of the population that may not go to college, that have an entirely different life. It really opens your eyes.

If I were a parent sending a kid to school to college today, I'd say, "Just take a year off and go work for a year or go start a business, and then go." Tremendous. This is such a great entrepreneurial story. I have no doubts that you're going to inspire some young girl or some young guy out there who's thinking of starting a company and say, "Hey, even in the field, as mature and as saturated as consumer products, you can find a little niche which is underserved. If you work hard enough at it, you can make it a business."

Alicia Tulsee: 100%.

Sal Daher: Alicia Tulsee, is there anything else that you want to say to our audience? It can be about your business, it can be about your life, whatever. Whatever you want to say.

Advice to the Audience

Alicia Tulsee: To your point about entrepreneurship and inspiring others, as a minority female founder, when one of us succeeds, all of us succeeds. We make it all the easier for those who come after us. I might not have an exit right now, there will be one in the future-

Sal Daher: You're young. You're going to have probably more than one exit.

Alicia Tulsee: -but what I can do is the learnings I've made this far, I can share. That is my other mission. One, to inspire women in healthcare and care for our nurses. Two, also, to help foster the next generation of entrepreneurs and help other people who aren't the majority, who are the minority, and disrupting other spaces.

Sal Daher: People don't understand, entrepreneurship is service. If you start a business with the attitude that, "I want to make money. That's all I'm going to do is make money." You will fail.

Alicia Tulsee: Agreed.

Sal Daher: If you start a business with the mentality that, "These poor nurses have this terrible problem with these ill-fitting uncomfortable scrubs and nobody's doing anything about it. I've checked, I've looked all over the place." Then you manage to figure out a way to convince a manufacturer to actually take you on and believe in you, and you get the right design and you get all this stuff going, there's a lot of long sleepless nights. This is someone who could very easily probably make more money just being an executive at a consumer brand, with a very nice life very, very posh, but you decided this little bit of expansion of territory for entrepreneurship has to be taken and has to be expanded to help others.

It's really about helping other people. People don't understand this. When I look at a founder whose motivation is just to make money, I say, "Forget about it. It's not an investable proposition because they're not going to succeed." The only way they'll succeed is if they really, really have a mission, and if they carry their mission through, execute on that mission, then they have the chance of making money for herself and for her investors and then to serve humanity tremendously. You're doing something that no one has ever done before. Nobody has made scrubs like this for nurses that actually fit them and actually works for them and are affordable.

[music]

Alicia Tulsee: For foster community.

Sal Daher: Do it by fostering community instead of just buying a lot of ad space. Hats off to you, Alicia Tulsee.

Alicia Tulsee: Thank you so much, Sal.

Sal Daher: Great. This is tremendous. It inspired me. I'm going to have a smile the rest of the afternoon.

Alicia Tulsee: Oh, I'm so glad to hear that. Thanks so much for having me.

Sal Daher: It's a pleasure. This is Angel Invest Boston, I’m Sal Daher. I have been speaking with Alicia Tulsee, the founder of Moxie Scrubs. Moxies that fit our hard-working nurses. Congratulations for a really impressive start to your company.

Alicia Tulsee: Thank you so much, and thank you again for having me. It's so great to speak with you, Sal.

Sal Daher: This is Angel Invest Boston. I’m Sal Daher. I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa, our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.

Katharine Woodman-Maynard