How Figs pivoted its Lindsey Vonn Winter Olympics campaign

When the marketers at Figs first started planning their Winter Olympics campaign, the story of alpine skiing legend Lindsey Vonn jumped out.

The mission behind the scrubs and medical apparel brand, which is the official outfitter of Team USA’s medical staff, is about supporting healthcare professionals, CMO Bené Eaton told us, and Vonn is certainly familiar with the medical space. The World Cup champion and Olympic gold medalist came out of retirement in 2024 after a partial knee replacement and then tore her ACL about a week before Milano Cortina, but announced her intention to race anyway.

To kick off the Olympics, Figs started running a campaign tied to Vonn’s return to the slopes with messaging centered on how medical professionals help athletes achieve their dreams. Then, the unthinkable happened: Vonn suffered a crash while attempting to reclaim a gold medal during the women’s downhill event, resulting in a fractured leg and several surgeries—not to mention a total shift in the narrative around her comeback.

Figs could have pulled its campaign entirely. Instead, Eaton and her team adjusted, working quickly to shift the creative and social strategy to address the changing circumstances, while leaning further into the message they had already been working to elevate.

“High-profile sporting events like the Olympics always come with unpredictability, but…our campaign wasn’t dependent on podium outcomes,” Eaton told Marketing Brew. “When Lindsey was injured, what became visible was the team of healthcare professionals working around the clock to support her, and that was the story that we were already telling.”

Operating room

Figs’ original ad, narrated by Vonn, tracked her through injury, surgery, rehab, and return to skiing. It featured several members of her medical team, and presented an honest portrayal of recovery, but also featured the tagline “It Takes Heart to Build Bodies That Break Records,” a relatively optimistic message that didn’t feel quite right after her unexpected injuries at the Games.

The brand created a new version of the ad, although the tagline didn’t change all that much. The new spot, titled “It Takes Heart to Build Bodies That Break Records. And For the Record, We Did,” includes a lot of the same footage and figures as the original, including Vonn’s Team USA surgeon, Tom Hackett, who narrates. While the message is largely the same, there are some additional changes beyond the new narrator, including the incorporation of headlines and posts hailing Vonn as a legend.

Everyone who appears in the campaign is a real medical professional who has worked with Vonn over the years, Eaton said. Vonn and Hackett are especially close, she added, and Figs dropped a social video about their friendship as part of the second iteration of the campaign. Vonn recently credited the doctor with sparing her leg from amputation after the crash.

Social support

Social was always going to be an element of Figs’ campaign, Eaton said, but it became even more integral in the wake of Vonn’s accident. The team immediately posted a message of support for Vonn and her team the day she was injured, and on Valentine’s Day, the brand dropped a carousel on Instagram featuring messages from healthcare professionals offering their own support, which Vonn reshared organically, Eaton said.

“Social is such a great way for us to…be able to connect with our community, be able to give them updates, and also be able to have a microphone for showcasing our support for [Vonn] and her team in this moment,” she said.

The goal of Figs’ Olympic campaign was always to celebrate healthcare workers, Eaton said. Like many big sports campaigns, it was designed to drive relevancy and awareness for the brand, but also for athletes’ medical teams, she said—an approach that was meant to help Figs stand out on the Olympic stage, given that it was “only a story we could tell.”

Since the brand goals were never tied to an athlete’s medal success, Eaton said that the change-ups felt more like a natural development than a crisis.

“It wasn’t a reactive pivot,” she said. “The injury, in that moment, didn’t really change the story. It just clarified it and made it deeper and more true in a way that was just really relevant.”