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Jessica Alba’s baby and lifestyle brand, The Honest Company, has been valued at around $1.7 billion after its latest funding round raised $100 million. Can we all take a few moments to marvel at the actress-turned-entrepreneur’s success in the three years since she launched her company? We can remember her starting out on short-lived sci-fi television show Dark Angel. This is like watching the nicest girl from secondary school do really well.
Alba co-founded Honest in 2011, with the aim of focusing on sustainability and transparency. The e-commerce company aims to sell nontoxic and eco-friendly products. Honest counts diapers, lotions and baby wipes among its most popular products. The company’s success is somewhat obvious in an era where people are growing more and more knowledgeable about what exactly goes into their food and the growing concerns surrounding plastics. (Read our article with Shawna Scott, the woman behind Sex Siopa, talk about how the sex toy industry is also addressing these worries.)
Considering billon-dollar start-ups are the ultimate goal in today’s business world, we hope that Alba and her co-founder Brian Lee are cracking up a bottle of champagne. We assume there will be organic written on the label somewhere. As Fortune points out, Honest is now valued at half a billion more that the very millennial glasses company Warby Parker. In another swoop of impressive facts about Honest, the company’s valuation increased by over 50% in the past year. There are even rumours of an IPO, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Alba and her team must be doubly delighted at this news as it also deflects attention from their recent sunscreen bad-news-story. A few weeks ago the company found itself on the defensive when various customers tweeted about their disappointment with the company’s natural sunscreen, saying that it did not sufficiently protect against sun damage and lead to some users being burnt. The company responded via a blogpost that the product in question went through rigorous testing, ?We’ve gone through extensive third-party testing in accordance with government regulations and our Sunscreen Lotion passed all SPF 30 testing requirements. It also received the best score possible from the Environmental Working Group (EWG). We care about taking every precaution possible to ensure that your product experience will keep you healthy and happy.?
Via Fortune