From the ICU to the Founder’s Chair

People are often surprised when they learn where Dripology really started. Not in a boardroom. Not in a marketing meeting. It started at the side of a hospital bed, where getting the details exactly right was the difference between someone going home and someone who didn’t.

Before I was a founder, I was a critical care nurse.

I went straight from nursing school into the ICU at MD Anderson — the number one oncology hospital in the world, and a place built entirely around research and rigor. My job was to care for the sickest people in the building, where “close enough” doesn’t exist. A dose, a line, a rate, a single missed sign — those are the margins you live inside every shift. That environment rewires how you think. It teaches you that discipline is a form of respect: for the patient, for the work, for the thing you’re responsible for.

One moment early on changed the entire trajectory of my life.

We were giving a patient an IV vitamin C infusion — ascorbic acid. I understood everything else we had running: the ventilator, the sedation, the IV antibiotics, the chemo. But I turned to my preceptor and asked, honestly, “What is the vitamin C actually doing here?” She looked at me, a little surprised I didn’t know, and said: given IV, it helps with tumor lysis syndrome, it boosts natural immunity, and it gives the body energy.

That stopped me. My background is in exercise physiology — I have a Bachelor of Science in exercise physiology alongside my nursing degree — and in all of that training, no one had ever connected the dots between vitamins, our ability to fight infection, and how we optimize the human body. And here it was, being used on some of the sickest patients in the country.

So I asked myself the question that’s driven everything since: Why are we waiting until people are this sick to use these tools?

That night I went home and searched — this was nearly fifteen years ago — for IV clinics and med spas. What I found was underwhelming. Almost everything was built around hangover recovery. I didn’t love the idea of quietly enabling a negative feedback loop around drinking too much. The science was powerful; the application felt small. So I filed the idea away and kept working.

Years later, my wife, Ash K. Holm — a celebrity makeup artist — and I moved to Los Angeles. Like any couple, we’d trade stories about our days. One night she told me about a shoot

where a nurse had come to give a client an IV and struggled to get the line in — sticking the client five separate times before it took.

That was the moment the old idea came roaring back. Because I knew it could be done better. I’d trained at two of the best hospitals in the country — MD Anderson, and then Cedars-Sinai here in LA — and I knew what real protocols, real technique, and real clinical discipline looked like. So I partnered with a friend of mine, an ER physician, and we set out to build something that did this better than it had ever been done: the clinical rigor of a top hospital, combined with the etiquette and hospitality Ash had mastered working with celebrities, bringing beauty and wellness together under one roof.

That was the beginning of Dripology.

The idea we built it on hasn’t changed: hospital-grade clinical discipline, wrapped in genuine luxury hospitality. Medical rigor meets beauty & performance.

It sounds simple. It is genuinely hard to do — because it means holding together two things most brands treat as opposites. On one side, we want you to walk into somewhere calm, warm, and beautiful, and be treated like the most important person in the room. On the other, the clinical foundation underneath that experience has to be as serious as anything you’d find in a hospital. A nurse behind every treatment. Real protocols. Real oversight. Nothing improvised — and no one poked five times.

To me, those two things were never in tension. The hospitality is the medicine. How we screen, how we chart, how carefully we listen before we ever start a line or touch a needle — that care is exactly what makes the luxury feel earned instead of decorative.

We didn’t start as a med spa. We started as an IV concierge service — showing up at the door with the kind of care I’d been trained to give, delivered at the level I knew it deserved. From there, we grew: into our first med spa, and into brand collaborations I couldn’t have imagined at the start — Alo, Buxom, Morphe, Dermalogica, and many others. None of it was easy. There was a lot of figuring out, a lot of learning in real time. But we kept building, and eventually opened our second med spa in Manhattan. I’m deeply proud of what this team has accomplished — and we have every intention of continuing to grow.

Building the company taught me a second lesson the ICU never could: a standard is only as strong as the system that carries it.

It’s one thing to do things right when it’s you and one room. It’s another to do them identically across locations, across a telehealth arm shipping protocols to people we may never meet in person, across a team that has to embody all of this whether I’m standing there or not. That’s the real work of the founder’s chair. Not the vision — the systems that make the vision survive contact with reality, at scale, on the busiest day.

I won’t pretend the move from clinician to CEO was clean. In the ICU, the feedback is

immediate and the mission is obvious. As a founder, you’re building things you won’t see the payoff on for months, making calls with incomplete information, and carrying the weight of a team and their families. What carried over — what I lean on constantly — is the instinct critical care drilled into me: slow down where it matters, protect the fundamentals, and never let the pace of growth talk you out of doing it right.

That instinct is the whole brand. When we say Be YOUR Best, we don’t mean becoming someone else. We mean getting you back to your own best baseline — clearer, stronger, more like yourself — in a place that treats your safety as seriously as your experience.

I didn’t leave the hospital behind. I brought the best of it with me.
And that’s the promise behind every drip, every treatment, and every door we open next.

— Hamed Afshari, Founder & CEO, Dripology