The Most Overlooked Moment in Healthcare. How Shawn Gibbs Is Reimagining the Patient Gown.

In healthcare, the biggest problems aren't always the most technologically complex ones. Often they're the things everyone has simply learned to stop seeing.

For Shawn Gibbs, one of those things was the patient gown. During his years as a medical provider, a patient came to him with a mole on her chest. She was so uncomfortable with the exposure the examination required that she declined to let him inspect it. She returned three months later, Gibbs recalls, with a substantially larger mole, and ultimately faced a more significant procedure and a more significant scar.

Gibbs doesn't claim a different gown would have changed her diagnosis. What stayed with him was simpler: if a patient doesn't feel safe enough to participate fully in her own exam, even excellent medicine starts at a disadvantage.

The object everyone stopped questioning

Gibbs is the co-founder and CEO of GIV Gowns, a young company trying to turn patient attire from an institutional afterthought into a deliberately designed part of care. Its products are reusable, premium garments built to provide coverage for the wearer while preserving targeted access for the clinician.

His central argument is simple. The gown is often the first physical object a person receives after entering a healthcare setting. Yet that first touchpoint is frequently cold, awkward, ill-fitting and difficult to fasten. Before the exam even begins, the patient may already feel diminished. In Gibbs's view, that's not a cosmetic inconvenience, it's part of the experience of care itself.

The idea first took shape in 2015. Gibbs built the first working prototype in 2022 and formally incorporated GIV Gowns in 2023, developing the business while continuing to work in his own clinic. He began tentative outreach to a small number of clinics in September 2025. The company's first official sale followed in February 2026, to a stem-cell and rehabilitation clinic.

That timeline is worth sitting with. GIV isn't a legacy supplier dressed up as a startup, and it isn't yet a mature healthcare company with years of market data behind it either. It's an early-stage venture trying to build a category around a problem its founder believes the industry stopped questioning a long time ago.

Designing for two people at once

The most telling product story here isn't about a breakthrough. It's about a bad zipper.

The first version of GIV Forward opened with a zipper running the full length of the front. It offered coverage, but it was deeply impractical, a patient had to reach nearly to their toes to open it completely. Gibbs can laugh about it now. The lesson became a rule for the company anyway: an idea only proves itself in practical use, not in a sketch.

The current version uses a curved front opening intended to give a provider predictable access without leaving the garment gaping or forcing the patient to keep adjusting it. Other products in the range address different specialties, ages and mobility needs, but the same two-user test applies throughout: does the patient stay covered and in control, and can the clinician still do the work?

Gibbs used his own family as a practical stress test. If his blind father and his mother, who lives with severe arthritis, couldn't get into and out of a prototype without struggling, the design wasn't ready. The company also offers magnetic and plastic-snap closures, letting facilities choose a non-magnetic option in settings where magnetic components would be inappropriate, such as around MRI equipment.

This is where GIV's defensibility is meant to live. The company says the modular openings and other novel elements across its product suite are covered by pending intellectual-property applications, while its brand name and select phrases are protected separately. The larger advantage, though, may be the accumulated detail that comes from designing with both sides of the exam table in mind.

Dignity is not a soft outcome

Founders often reach for the word dignity because it sounds humane. Gibbs uses it more specifically, as a condition that can shape trust, confidence and participation.

He remembers a young patient with leukemia for whom a custom gown was made to resemble his own athletic jersey. Before receiving it, Gibbs says, the boy's parents sometimes spent days persuading him to attend treatment. Wearing something that felt like his own identity, rather than a symbol of illness, appeared to change how he approached the process.

The issue became personal again when Gibbs's mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. He says having a GIV Gown available helped her feel more prepared, more in control, and more willing to engage with the exams, surgery, chemotherapy and follow-up that came next. These are personal observations, not clinical-trial results, but they're the emotional evidence that pushed him to take the idea beyond his own practices.

GIV-specific pilots are currently under way across several settings, including pediatric emergency care, surgery, orthopedics, chiropractic care, physical therapy, obstetrics and gynecology, and rehabilitation. The company hasn't yet published formal results, sample sizes or long-term comparative outcomes, and it hasn't completed a formal life-cycle assessment of its own products either.

GIV points to broader research on the link between patient dignity, trust and disclosure generally, while being clear that research wasn't conducted on GIV's own products specifically. A founder's conviction can justify testing something. It can't substitute for proof.

A premium category, not a cheaper gown

Gibbs isn't trying to win a price contest against paper gowns or conventional cotton alternatives. He says GIV products currently cost roughly two to four times as much, depending on volume, closure type and custom branding. His bet is that healthcare organizations will evaluate the wider system, useful life, laundering, replacement, staff time, extra sheets, patient experience and waste, rather than the unit price alone.

Institutional adoption is slow by nature, though. Depending on the organization, approval may sit with a practice owner, an office manager, nursing leadership, a supply-chain team, or a board and executive group. Gibbs says early sales cycles have ranged from one or two weeks to two or three months, and he stays personally involved in the first stages of most conversations.

Consumer demand is where GIV's strategy gets more interesting. Through its Bring Your Own Gown movement, the company encourages patients to bring personal attire to an appointment and let their clinical team know they've brought it. Gibbs describes one customer who brought a GIV Gown to a colonoscopy; the encounter prompted the clinic itself to explore institutional adoption. Consumer demand, in that model, does more than generate revenue on its own. It makes an otherwise invisible category visible to the clinicians and buyers who'd never have gone looking for it.

The company also uses the designation GIV Certified Partner for organizations that align with its principles, a company signal, Gibbs is careful to note, not an independent clinical accreditation. Separately, one percent of every gown sold funds the GIV Back Initiative, which so far has gone toward custom GIV Kids Hero Gowns for children battling cancer, including one made to resemble a young patient's own team jersey and another designed as a princess gown for a four-year-old girl in treatment. An outside advisory firm oversees how the funds are governed and distributed.

The founder still has to get out of the way

GIV may have begun with one clinician's frustration, but Gibbs knows founder conviction can become a bottleneck on its own. He has built companies before and admits he's sometimes been the roadblock himself. This time, he says, role transitions are tied to specific milestones, and he expects specialists on his team to challenge his judgment when their experience runs deeper than his.

The most difficult decisions so far have involved people, whom to bring in, whom to trust, and when to let someone move on. He describes a distinct ‘GIV way’ built around patient dignity, provider efficiency and social impact, and alignment with that mission isn't meant to be a poster on the wall. It's meant to be a live test applied to partnerships, hiring and capital.

The business has been bootstrapped and is now pursuing an initial friends-and-family raise. Gibbs says he's open to outside investment, but not money that arrives with control attached and no real operating value behind it. He's looking for strategic guidance, relationships and experience, while keeping the mission itself non-negotiable.

The standard Gibbs wants to build

In three to five years, Gibbs wants GIV to have a global footprint. His most telling milestone isn't a revenue target or a facility count. It's the day a provider says, ‘hand me a gown,’ and everyone in the room understands that a GIV Gown is what's meant. On the consumer side, he wants patients to know they have a choice before they ever walk into the exam room.

That ambition still has to survive the hard work every healthcare company faces: repeatable manufacturing, quality assurance, regulatory discipline, evidence, education and distribution at scale. GIV's product story is compelling because the problem is immediately recognizable to almost anyone who has sat in a paper gown. Its long-term success will depend on whether the company can prove that better design creates repeatable value for patients, providers and healthcare systems, not just a better first impression.

There's a leadership lesson in that, even if Gibbs wouldn't necessarily put it this way himself. The breakthrough here isn't a new technology. It's a founder who noticed a familiar object nobody else was questioning, and decided that was reason enough to build something.

Editor's note: This article is based on CEOInsider's written interview with Shawn Gibbs and a review of GIV Gowns' public website. Statements concerning company pilots, adoption, intellectual property, product performance and business activity are attributed to Gibbs or GIV Gowns. GIV-specific clinical results have not yet been published. Learn more at givgowns.com.