The Wild West of Wellness & Why We Do It the Hard Way
When we first got into this field, it was the wild west. IV drips and injectables were exploding in popularity, and the rules hadn’t caught up. People were getting IVs in places with no licensed professional in the building. Botox was being injected by people who had no business holding a needle. And behind the scenes — where clients never look — it was worse: no emergency protocols, no good faith exams, no patient history collected before someone started a treatment that goes straight into your bloodstream. Here’s the uncomfortable part: a lot of that is still true. You don’t have to look hard to find the headlines — unlicensed injectors, product that never came from a legitimate pharmacy, treatments performed with no plan for what happens if something goes wrong. In an industry built on how you look and feel, far too many operators treat the medical part as an afterthought. That’s exactly why we built Dripology. Not to add one more IV bar to the pile — to do this the way it should have been done from the start. So let me tell you what “the right way” actually looks like behind our doors. Every client is a patient first. Before anyone receives a single treatment, they complete a full intake — medical history, surgical history, allergies. We perform good faith exams. We don’t guess, and we don’t skip steps to move faster. If we don’t have what we need to treat you safely, we don’t treat you. We hold our nurses to the highest standard. California is stringent about the laws around medical treatment, and we’re glad it is. We don’t treat those requirements as a ceiling to duck under — we treat them as a floor. Our nurses are trained, licensed, and held to a level of care I’d want for my own family. We’re obsessive about sourcing. I don’t take anyone’s word for where our medications and IV additives come from. I’ve personally toured the facilities of the pharmacies we work with. If it’s going into our clients, I want to have seen where it came from with my own eyes. We built the systems most places skip. A code of ethics we review with every nurse. A real charting system. Emergency protocols, so that if a rare moment ever comes, no one is improvising. And a clinical bench behind our nurses — physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and a medical director — so there’s always oversight and support, and never a nurse left on an island. None of this is glamorous. It doesn’t photograph well. But it’s the entire difference between an experience and a risk. And here’s what most people don’t realize: those standards aren’t only how we protect our clients — they’re the reason the biggest names in the industry trust us. When brands like Dermalogica, Alo, Morphe, Kosas, and Gymshark reach out to run their events and activations with us, they’re not choosing us because we’re the only option. There’s no shortage of med spas, and there’s certainly no shortage of IV companies. They choose us because we execute at a high level, with absolute professionalism, with nurses trained to perform regardless of the situation. When you put your brand’s name next to a medical service, in front of your own customers, you cannot afford for it to go sideways. We’re the partner people trust with that. That trust shows up closer to home, too. We’re incredibly proud of the nearly 500 five-star reviews we’ve earned from clients — people who felt cared for, felt safe, and then turned around and recommended us to their friends, their family, their coworkers. You don’t get that from marketing. You get it from doing the work right, every single time. That’s the whole idea behind Dripology. Be YOUR Best was never just about the glow you walk out with — it’s about being able to trust, completely, the hands you put yourself in to get there. The wild west made shortcuts normal. We decided, from day one, that the hard way was the only way worth building. — Hamed Afshari, Founder & CEO, Dripology
Find Your Flow: What a Sunday-Night House Call Taught Me About Execution
As CEO, I’m responsible for almost everything: hiring and firing, approving events, brand outreach and collaborations, training our team, choosing our equipment, placing stock orders, following up on every thread we have going, and making the day-to-day calls that keep the business moving. And every so often — rarely, but it happens — I’m still a nurse. I’ll go out and do patient care myself. This is a story about one of those nights. More than that, it’s about the single skill I believe carries you through almost anything: flow. It was a Sunday. Around 9 p.m., a request came in — a longtime client of my wife’s wanted an IV drip at home, along with her partner. We didn’t have a nurse staffed for that day and time, and I didn’t want to leave a good client without care or let the opportunity slip. So I said I’d go myself. Then the noise started. First, they asked us to send a female nurse — they preferred one. Any other day, we could have. That day, the only person available was me. We told them so, and they said that was fine. But here’s the thing: if you’re someone who lives in your own head, that’s the exact kind of detail that starts the spiral. Maybe they don’t really want me there. Maybe this is going to be awkward. I’ve done this long enough that I didn’t give it much weight. I put it down and kept moving. I got to the security gate around 8:45 and gave my name. They didn’t have me on the list. Who are you here to see? I gave the client’s name — they didn’t have that either. What address? I gave it. The guard made a few calls, and after a while, the gate opened. That’s another perfect moment to start second-guessing yourself. I didn’t. I parked on the street and rang the bell. The client opened the door and told me her partner had stepped out to run an errand and would be back soon — could I wait in the formal dining room? She asked me to take off my shoes. I sat down. And I realized it was just the two of us in a big house, alone. So I didn’t even open my kit. There was no cell reception either — common in the LA hills — so I just sat quietly and looked at photos of my daughter on my phone. I want to be clear about why: when it’s just you and a client alone in someone’s home, professionalism and discretion aren’t optional. I kept my kit closed, my hands visible, and myself exactly where I’d been asked to sit. After a while she came in and said her partner had been sick and she didn’t want to catch it — what did I recommend? I talked her through the options. She asked me to hold off on mixing the vitamins until he was back, so I could explain everything to him too. That made complete sense to me. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, she asked me to start her IV — and warned me she’s a very hard stick, that people always struggle with her veins. Add that to the pile: the waiting, and now someone telling you they’re difficult before you’ve even reached for the tourniquet. That’s more noise. Here’s what I did instead of listening to it. I went back to the only thing that matters in that moment: It’s just an arm. It’s just a tourniquet. It’s just a catheter. Hang the bag. Tourniquet on. One shot. Bag hung, vitamins in, dripping. Ten minutes into her drip, her partner walked in — an artist I’d admired for years. If you get starstruck, that’s your moment. He was direct: he’d been really sick, dehydrated, and he asked what was in the bag. I told him. “Let’s do it.” Same words running in my head — it’s just an arm, it’s just a tourniquet, it’s just a catheter — one shot, set up, dripping. And there was one more piece of noise running quietly underneath all of it: I hadn’t started an IV in over a month. I’ll be transparent about that. I run a company now; sticking veins isn’t my daily anymore. Am I going to be sharp? She’s a hard stick. He’s dehydrated. My answer to that voice is a flow so simple it can’t desert me — plus one question I always ask before I reach for anyone’s arm: are you right-handed or left-handed? The vasculature on your dominant side tends to be a little more pronounced. Small thing. Part of the order of operations. With both of them dripping, I gave them their privacy — they were on the couch watching Netflix. Liter bags run about 40 to 45 minutes, so I sat back in the dining room and came in for a quiet visual check every 15 or 20 minutes. Hers finished first; I decannulated her and cleared the pole, then waited and came back for him. I thanked them both and sent the invoice. And yes — there was no internet at the house, so I couldn’t charge them on the spot. Doesn’t matter. The invoice goes out later. The job is the job. Here’s why I tell this story. In one house call, there were at least half a dozen moments where I could have gotten tripped up — the gate, the gender request, the long wait, being alone in the house, the “hard stick,” the star power, the month away from it, the dead cell signal, the missing internet. None of it mattered. All that mattered was executing the task in front of me, cleanly and professionally. That’s flow. Not the mystical version — the practical one. A flow is an order of operations you’ve drilled so thoroughly that you can run it while everything around you is pulling at your attention. When the noise gets
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