A brand for the people who never get a chair to sit in
Moxie Scrubs started with a name and a hunch. The name is a small word that means a force of character, determination, and resourcefulness - the qualities Alicia Tulsee saw every time a nurse walked into a room where everything was going wrong and made it go right. The hunch was that nobody had ever built clothing as if the nurse, and not the hospital purchasing department, was the customer.
That hunch turned into the first direct-to-consumer lifestyle brand for nurses, incubated inside the Harvard Innovation Labs and now headquartered in the Cambridge area of Massachusetts. The clothes are engineered around real shifts: lightweight, breathable, moisture-wicking fabric, functional pockets that hold what a nurse actually carries, a draped fit built across sizes rather than scaled up from a men's pattern. The proof is unglamorous and convincing - Moxie reports a roughly 2% return rate in an industry where 30 to 40% of garments come back.
By 2025 and 2026 the company had grown past the closet and into the staffing crisis itself. Tulsee launched Moxie360, an AI-powered workforce platform that helps hospitals see nurse burnout coming and keep the people they already have. Her framing is blunt: the nursing shortage is a retention problem, not only a hiring problem, and nurses leave not because they stop caring but because the system stops caring for them.
That last part is the catch that makes the whole thing work. Tulsee is not a clinician. "For nurses, by nurses" is not a tagline she earned by working the floor; it is a method. She co-designs with the people who wear the product, starting from the very first nurse who believed in the idea before a single stitch existed.
Moxie is for nurses, by nurses because nurses are the beating heart of healthcare.- Alicia Tulsee, Moxie Scrubs
How a clothing brand convinced investors it was a movement
In May 2022, Tulsee announced roughly $2.4M in pre-seed funding, a number that sounds modest until you learn how little of the early growth depended on it. Moxie had spent its first stretch largely bootstrapped, and the company says it reached around $1M in annual recurring revenue within about eighteen months of launch. The backers were not random: Ember Companies came in, as did the Harvard Business School Alumni Angels, and the company moved through the accelerator circuit that runs along the Charles - MassChallenge, the Harvard Innovation Labs, and TiE ScaleUp Boston among them.
The traction figures Tulsee has shared read like a marketer's revenge on the assumption that scrubs are a commodity. Roughly 6,000 early customers. About 60% of revenue from repeat buyers. A customer acquisition cost in the tens of dollars rather than the hundreds. And that stubborn 2% return rate, the single statistic she returns to most often, because it is the cleanest possible signal that the product fits the person. People do not send back the thing they have been waiting for.
Recognition followed the numbers. Fast Company named Moxie to its Brands That Matter list in 2022, in the On the Rise category. Forbes put Tulsee on the Next 1000 in 2023. Earlier, the brand partnered with the American Nurses Association for Nurses Month in 2021, and the product turned up everywhere from a Good Morning America Deals & Steals segment to roundups of the best scrubs to actually buy.
From the closet to the org chart
Selling clothes to nurses gave Tulsee something more valuable than margin: a direct line to hundreds of thousands of them, and a running feed of what was actually breaking inside hospitals. The clothes were a symptom of a deeper problem. Nurses were exhausted, undervalued, and leaving. So Moxie started building software for the institutions that employ them.
Moxie360 is the result - an AI-powered workforce and well-being platform meant to flag burnout risk early and help hospitals keep the nurses they already have. The pitch reframes a number that administrators have been throwing money at for years. The shortage, Tulsee argues, is less about finding new nurses and more about not bleeding out the current ones. Her LinkedIn now lists her as founder and president of Moxie360, working out of Cambridge, and the company has described early hospital programs and pilot contracts as it pushes the apparel insight into enterprise software.
It is a logical leap for someone whose whole career has been about reading what people in front of her actually need. She started by making nurses feel seen in the mirror. Moxie360 is the same instinct aimed at the staffing meeting.
The cab ride that became a company
Every founder has a tidy version of the moment it began. Tulsee's is genuinely a cab ride. While incubating the idea at the Harvard Innovation Labs, she shared a ride home with Ashley Jerome, a registered nurse. Alicia described what she was thinking of building. Ashley lit up. That reaction was the tipping point, and Ashley became Moxie's first nurse-collaborator.
"It was my huge 'ah-ha moment' to start a brand dedicated to nurses," Tulsee has said. "As Ashley says, that story never gets old." It is the rare origin story where the spark was someone else's enthusiasm, which tells you something about how Tulsee builds - by listening for the moment a stranger leans in.
The deeper reason is older and quieter. Tulsee spent a great deal of her early life in hospital rooms, watching nurses care for the people she loved most. The admiration never left. Moxie is, in her telling, a way of paying a debt. "They show up for us at our worst," she has said. "So I created Moxie Scrubs to take care of nurses."
Flea markets, Bangalore, and a Harvard economics degree
Apparel was practically a family trade. Tulsee grew up in Queens, the daughter of immigrants from Trinidad and Tobago. Her mother arrived in the United States as an au pair and, among other ventures, ran a basement cut-and-sew operation stitching garments for Baby Gap. Alicia learned how clothes get made before most people learn to drive.
At nineteen, while working retail at Macy's, she ran two stalls at the AquaDuck Flea Market, sourcing costume jewelry and handbags through the earliest eBay wholesalers. The flea-market money bought a plane ticket to India to explore her heritage, where an internship at a magazine snowballed into a sales manager role in Bangalore. From there she moved into marketing and helped launch the Budweiser Brand Ambassador Program in India.
The schooling was just as nonlinear. She started fashion school and left it. She tried pre-med and met her match in organic chemistry. She eventually earned an economics degree from Harvard. The pattern is the point: she keeps reinventing what she is until the version that sticks is the one nobody assigned her.
Her mother ran a basement factory sewing for Baby Gap. Apparel was the family business before it was the career.
Two flea-market stalls at nineteen, stocked from early eBay wholesalers, funded the trip that started everything.
She helped launch Budweiser's Brand Ambassador Program in India - then came home to scrubs.
Dropped fashion school. Flopped organic chemistry. Graduated Harvard in economics. The detours were the route.
The operating manual
Tulsee talks about building the way a flea-market vendor learns to read a crowd - fast, cheap to test, and unsentimental about what does not sell. Her advice to other founders has the cadence of lessons paid for in full.
A world record, and a national day
The most photographed thing Moxie ever made was not on a runway. In 2022 a Penn Medicine nurse and elite runner named Sam Roecker ran the Boston Marathon in Moxie Scrubs and set a Guinness World Record for the fastest marathon in a nurse's uniform. It was a customer's feat, not the founder's, which is exactly how Tulsee likes the story to read: the brand is the supporting cast, the nurse is the lead.
She has since pushed the same idea into civic territory, launching the first National Thank a Nurse Day. Her ask is small and human: stop, look a nurse in the eye, and mean it. "It's a moment for us to truly take notice," she has said, "and really look a nurse in the eye and say, 'Thank you. I see you.'"