Two years ago, 260 people a month searched Google for "espresso figs". As of September 2026 it is 4,400 a month, up 400% in a year and roughly 24 times what it was in late 2024. Espresso is not a product. It is a shade of dark brown that medical apparel brand FIGS paints onto scrubs it already sells.
Here is the part nobody writing about this has looked at. The brand term "figs" does 1,500,000 searches a month and grew 0% over the past year. Every bit of movement in scrub search sits inside one colorway. And when we counted what that colorway does on resale, it was trading at roughly twice retail while another color from the exact same October drop was trading at a little over half. That gap is the whole story, and it is a story about scarcity marketing arriving in a category that has never needed it.
Key takeaways:
- "espresso figs" is at 4,400 US monthly searches as of September 2026, up 400% in a year and 1,592% in two. Our database classifies it EXPONENTIAL.
- The curve has two peaks of exactly 6,600, in April 2026 and July 2026. That is a restock calendar, not a launch.
- FIGS calls it a "flash drop" in its own newsroom and says the stock comes in "extremely limited quantities". It is the only single color on the FIGS newsroom with a surprise-drop post of its own.
- On Poshmark, 26 of 29 single-garment Espresso listings were asking above FIGS retail on 20 October 2026, median 2.08x. The Allison pant retails at $64 and sits on resale at $165 to $170 new with tags.
- Bonsai, a color from the same October drop, is the control: 17 listings, 3 above retail, median 0.60x.
- The parent brand is not spiking. FIGS reported Q2 2026 net revenues of $196.6 million, up 28.8%, while the search term "figs" grew 0% over twelve months.
Let's get into it.
The search spike, in numbers
Here is the monthly search volume for "espresso figs" over two years, straight from our database.
Look at the shape rather than the height. The term sits under 2,000 for eighteen months, spikes to 6,600 in April 2026, falls all the way back to 1,000 by June, spikes to 6,600 again in July, then bleeds down through 5,400 in August to 4,400 in September 2026. Two peaks of identical height, three months apart. A product launch makes one peak and a decay. A drop calendar makes this.
The second chart is the one that reframes it. Set the colorway against the brand terms in our database and the movement is all in one place.
"figs" at 1,500,000 monthly searches grew 0% in a year. Mandala Scrubs, the nearest challenger brand term at 301,000, grew 22%. Healing Hands Scrubs, at 49,500, fell 18%. One colorway grew 400%. Nobody is searching harder for the brand. They are searching for one specific thing the brand will not keep in stock.
What Espresso actually is
A dark brown. That is it. FIGS applies it to the scrubwear it already makes, in its own FIONx fabric, and the prices are the normal prices.
That page is doing more work than it looks. On 20 October 2026 the women's Espresso collection carried 36 items, and a good share of them are not scrubs at all. The Catarina, Casma and Rafaela tops are $42. The Livingston pant is $48, the Kade and Zamora pants $52, the Isabel $58, the Allison and Rochelle $64. Then it keeps going: a Boucle Jacket at $128, a Boucle Vest at $108, a scrub cap at $22, a scrunchie at $12, a claw clip at $14, compression socks at $32 and a FIGS x New Balance 327 sneaker at $128.
A color became a merchandising line. You cannot buy a mood, but you can buy the scrunchie that matches it.
Why a brown scrub became a drop
The trigger is dated, and it comes from the company itself rather than from coverage.
28 July 2026. FIGS published a newsroom post titled "FIGS Releases More Viral Espresso Scrubs in Surprise Drop". The language is worth reading as written. It calls the release "another flash drop of their viral Espresso color" and "their second surprise launch of the year", a "limited run of nine best-selling styles", available "in extremely limited quantities", and "a direct response to consistent community feedback". It then teases "a larger Espresso drop sometime later this year". Search volume that month: 6,600, the joint highest in the series.
6 October 2026. The larger drop arrived. FIGS announced the Fall Drop with Espresso named first and called "iconic", alongside a new Dark Acai and a returning Bonsai, plus the boucle outerwear. Three colors, one day, one press post. Remember that, because it gives us a clean control a few sections down.
The FIGS newsroom runs colorway announcements all year: Celery and Deep Purple in July, Seaglass and Sea Mist in June, Purple Haze and Fireside in May, Sagewater and Smokey Taupe in August. Those arrive in pairs, briefly, as housekeeping. Espresso is the only color that got a surprise-drop post to itself with the word "viral" in the headline. The brand is not describing the demand. It is staging it.
Healthcare workers have noticed the staging and mostly find it funny. This try-on from @ivyiblann, posted on 15 October 2026 nine days after the Fall Drop, is the genre: open the box, hold it up, confirm it looks good on shift.
Two days after the July drop, physician and creator @clinicallyelevated posted a styling video captioned "This is for the girls who won the ESPRESSO war". It had 729 likes and 31 comments when we checked on 20 October 2026. Nobody writes "war" about a restock of navy.
What the resale market says
This is the measurement nothing ranking for this term has run, so here is the method before the number. On 20 October 2026 we pulled the newest women's listings on Poshmark for figs espresso and for figs bonsai. We kept only single garments whose style name maps to a price on the FIGS site the same day, and dropped sets, jumpsuits, jackets and vests, which have no clean single-item anchor. Then we divided the asking price by what FIGS charges.
| Colorway | Listings matched | Asking above FIGS retail | Median ask vs retail | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Espresso | 29 | 26 | 2.08x | 2.66x |
| Bonsai | 17 | 3 | 0.60x | 1.54x |
Same brand. Same fall drop. Same week, same platform, same buyers. Espresso asks roughly twice what FIGS charges and Bonsai asks a little over half.
The individual listings are blunter than the median. The Allison High-Rise Ultra-Wide-Leg Scrub Pant retails at $64; five separate Espresso listings sat between $150 and $170, several of them new with tags. The Kade pant retails at $52 and was listed at $120 and $130. The Isabel retails at $58 and was listed at $125 to $135. Meanwhile Bonsai Zamora joggers, retail $52, were asking $22, $23, $25, $30 and $34, and Bonsai Catarina tops, retail $42, were asking $20 and $25.
That is the same gap you see when a limited sneaker colorway clears at a premium while the general release sits, which we tracked through the One Piece sneaker collaborations and again in the Satoshi Vans drop. It has simply never happened to a work uniform before.
What the community actually says
The r/Figsscrubs subreddit reads like a stock ticker. Thread titles on the Espresso discussion run in sequence: "Espresso update", "Espresso coming back?", "Espresso is back!", "Will they restock espresso?". One user, in a thread about the color vanishing from the site, reported that "the women's pants were all sold out". In another thread, someone summarised the pattern: "From what I keep reading, they are bringing them back again sometime towards the end of this year. They've been redropping older colors, not new."
The scepticism is loud too, and it is the healthiest thing in the thread. One post is titled "Espresso really that good?": "Can someone explain the hype about espresso? Does it really look that good in person? They just seem like brown scrubs to me haha."
They are brown scrubs. The point was never the brown.
What this means for the category
Scarcity now works on people who buy for work, not for fun. Uniform buying used to be a replenishment purchase: your pants wear out, you buy the same pants. Drop mechanics turn a replenishment purchase into an event with a losing side, and the losing side pays 2x on Poshmark. Retailers in every unglamorous category should read that as an invitation, which is roughly the logic behind several of the ideas in our list of the best businesses to start in 2026.
Brand search is now a lagging indicator. FIGS reported Q2 2026 net revenues of $196.6 million, up 28.8% year over year, with 3.1 million active customers and an average order value of $127. Chief executive Trina Spear said the quarter was the company's "third straight quarter of 25%-plus net revenues growth". None of that showed up in searches for "figs", which were flat. If you track a brand by its head term you would have concluded nothing was happening. The demand moved into the SKU.
The resale floor is the real brand asset. A colorway that holds 2x on the secondary market is a colorway people will queue for at full price. That is the mechanic behind the Labubu collectible boom and the same reason a sold-out launch sets a brand's ceiling rather than its revenue, which we argued at length about the Reale Actives launch. It is also why the broader shift toward secondhand keeps showing up across clothing trends and retail trends in our data.
What to watch next
Does the fourth quarter make a third peak? The Fall Drop landed on 6 October 2026, after our September data closed. If "espresso figs" prints another figure near 6,600 for October or November, the drop calendar is now a reliable machine and FIGS will run it every quarter. If it prints 3,000, the July peak was the ceiling and the restocks are getting cheaper to ignore.
Watch the brand term, not the color term. "figs" at 1,500,000 and 0% growth is the number that decides whether any of this matters commercially. A colorway that pulls new people to the brand should eventually move the head term. If Espresso keeps climbing while "figs" stays flat, the drops are recycling the same customers, which is a merchandising win and not a growth one.
Watch the challengers copy it. Mandala Scrubs at 301,000 and up 22%, and Healing Hands Scrubs at 49,500 and down 18%, are the obvious candidates to run a limited color of their own. The first scrubs brand that is not FIGS to generate a resale premium on a single shade will tell us this is a category behaviour rather than one company's good idea.
For now the honest summary is that FIGS found something most apparel brands spend years failing to manufacture: a product people feel they can lose. The company did not invent a fabric or a fit for it. It picked a brown, printed a limited number, and let the nurses do the rest.
Want to spot a drop before the resale price tells you? Read our guide on how to identify market trends, or browse what is breaking out right now in our trending topics list.
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