Over the past 10 years Actress gone Entrepreneur Jessica Alba has broken barriers and paved the way with her company "The Honest Company." Alba joined us at Power Trip, Marie Claire’s annual conference bringing together some of the biggest and brightest female leaders and execs. During her conversation with Marie Claire's Editor-in-Chief, Sally Holmes, Alba shared some words of wisdom that she's learned over the past decade of building her brand.
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00:00You are, I would say, the OG celebrity founder.
00:05You have been 10 years of Honest Company.
00:09A little more than that.
00:11A little bit more than that?
00:12Totally.
00:13Okay, tell us.
00:15How does it feel 10 years later?
00:18With me in the business, I was so hard on myself for so long.
00:23And then I got to a place where I gave myself some grace.
00:26I take in the lessons of the challenges or the hardships and also allow myself to receive the wins.
00:36I used to be, up until not too long ago, wildly uncomfortable with taking in anything that was good.
00:44I felt so undeserving.
00:46So I think that's another thing is maybe when there's so few of us at the table in those positions of power,
00:56especially, you know, we do make up 50% of the population,
01:00but we're so wildly underrepresented in business, in a lot of power rooms.
01:07And when you don't see yourself, you feel like maybe you don't deserve to be there.
01:11And that's fake news, right?
01:13It's the conditioning that we're used to, that we grew up with, that we have to unwind.
01:18So it's been an amazing journey and very fulfilling.
01:26It's cool how it can take on so many different waves as you grow.
01:32So the company started with a more narrow selection of baby products, wipes, and its personal care and has expanded.
01:41How do you guide the strategy of a now publicly traded company?
01:47I started with 17 products in three pretty large sectors.
01:54I felt like I needed to test out whether there was going to be reception of clean in these pretty major categories.
02:05Home, detergent space, the personal care space, which is not necessarily beauty, but kind of.
02:14It's like what you put on your skin, what you put around the home, which is the detergents and cleaning.
02:20And then obviously on the thing that's going to touch probably the most vulnerable people, which are babies.
02:26So that's why I chose those three categories.
02:28And what I was really trying to solve for or tackle is the injustice that we face every day in being exposed to unnecessary and harmful chemicals that actually cause lots of illness.
02:45And these companies that are making these chemicals that put them in the products that are in on and around all of us every day.
02:54And I was like, maybe there can be a more human way to approach business.
03:02And so I really was trying to tackle these sort of like giant categories in my small little tiny way.
03:09And that's why I created a company that went into three different pretty big categories, 17 products.
03:16And I launched online because I felt like that was going to give me, I guess, the ability or the leverage to show that no matter where you lived, you should have access to these types of products.
03:30You didn't need to just live next to said store to access it.
03:36And to make this information just more accessible also to everyone, I think a lot of people didn't know that, you know, if you go to the grocery or if you go to a department store, you think if you spend more money on it, it's going to be safer.
03:52Or if you go to that store that you grew up going to, it was going to be safer, but it's actually not.
04:00There's no real laws that protect human health or really protect you around your safety.
04:11Even for pregnant women, there's no real laws that say that companies can't market products to pregnant women and make sure that they're actually safe for pregnant women.
04:23There's no laws protecting babies that, you know, if something is marketed for you to use on or near your baby, that it's actually safe for that baby.
04:33And there's certainly no laws saying that anything that comes in contact with your skin or your environment will be safe for you.
04:42So they're testing on us.
04:45And I was like, what the heck?
04:48So that's why I went into all those different product categories.
04:52And then can you really differentiate?
04:56Can you really stand up against competition?
04:58Is there a real reason for you to be there?
05:00And can you do it at a price that's within reach?
05:06Because there's a lot of things we can do for like a million bucks.
05:10But if you're trying to make it accessible, can you scale the idea?
05:15Can you take us behind the scenes of what it looks like to take a company public and specifically your company public and really navigating the seas of a historically male dominated stock market?
05:28I would say that if you have a peaceful, relaxing life and you sleep well at night, don't take your company public.
05:40But who has that?
05:41No, I'm kidding.
05:42No, it's actually important for us to take our companies public.
05:47It's actually necessary.
05:50Between 2013 and 2020, there were over 2,000 companies that went public and only 18 of them had female leadership.
05:59That's wild.
06:01It was a really brutal experience.
06:03They really do try to throw as many banana peels in front of you as humanly possible.
06:10And I would say that there's probably no one better to navigate banana peels than a woman in business.
06:17We get these things thrown at us left, right and center.
06:22So you're the youngest Latina ever to take a company public, which I think deserves a big round of applause.
06:32So you just talked about how hard it was to get there.
06:36What was it like then ringing that bell?
06:39It was interesting because I think when I started the business, it was really around this social justice of like,
06:49how can I make sure that more people have access to live their best life, access to the information, access to products.
06:59Hopefully, if I can get the consumers to feel more empowered, we can actually start to change other companies and other companies' values.
07:10And there will be a bit of a groundswell.
07:13So now, you know, before, everyone was like, what does clean mean?
07:16And is that a thing that only moms care about?
07:19Now, you literally can't walk into a store without saying clean beauty, without saying products that are clean and better for you,
07:28basically in every category.
07:31And I'm really proud that it only took 10 years for that to happen, to literally create that space.
07:37And a lot of the competitors are forced to step up, which is awesome.
07:43And certainly getting us to that finish line, that it wasn't until I was like writing the speech with Jen, who's here, who's head of Marcom,
07:52and she's one of my writer guys, that's been with me.
07:55And, you know, we were writing the, she was like, you have to do a speech.
08:03And this was like, you know, we were the first company during COVID to actually do it in the NASDAQ offices.
08:08So it was like a whole situation.
08:10We weren't sure.
08:10We're going to do it there.
08:11We're going to be remote.
08:12And I realized in that moment that sort of it was like a call to action, but also a way to kind of show up for a community of people that, for the most part, have never been on that stage.
08:28And I was like, OK, so I felt that.
08:32And then that, I guess, I mean, I know it gave me the strength to really allow the moment to breathe and be what it needed to be, which is I got this far so that not only did I like open the door,
08:51but I blew the doors open and I mowed down a lot of those hills so that a lot more can come through.
08:59And so I just wanted to make sure that anybody who was watching or listening in that moment or any moment can see that that's what me being there meant.
09:13I felt like it was easier to control my destiny launching a D2C brand.
09:19And I would say I recommend that for anyone, having your foundational principles in D2C, because there's nothing like that ownership, right?
09:32It's sort of like the flagship store.
09:35Imagine your flagship being online.
09:38And so take care of that.
09:40And no one can, like, take that away from you.
09:42And it's sort of like your nucleus, then anything else can happen from there.
09:47But ultimately, you have to be where the consumer wants you to be.
09:51And so if the consumer wants you to be in a brick and mortar, go to make sure you have that.
09:56If they want you to be in a retail channel, make sure you're there or partner with, you know, wherever there's more ease for them to find you, frankly.
10:08I don't think we should be too married to any model.
10:13I think social commerce is actually 10 years behind where it should be, frankly.
10:19And that's probably where it's all going anyway.
10:23When you control the relationship with the consumer, you just have so much more power.
10:29And you can test and learn a lot more.
10:33You don't have to rely so much on others for innovation.
10:40So my final question for you, and to say thank you also for joining us.
10:45This has been so fun.
10:46In the beginning, we introduced you as an actress, an entrepreneur, a founder.
10:53How would you introduce yourself?
10:55I'm a terrible speller.
11:00I'm an amateur chef.
11:01I think I dream big.
11:07I'm a dreamer.
11:09And I believe in people.
11:14I do.
11:16And I believe in goodness.
11:18And I have hope.
11:21My job, I think, is probably to unlock as much of that as possible.
11:28And whether that's through telling stories and entertainment or telling stories through products.
11:35Great.
11:37So maybe that's how I would describe myself.
11:39And a very imperfect mom.
11:41But my kids still tell me their secrets.
11:45So that's cool.
11:48Jessica, thank you so much for joining us.
11:50So lovely to have you.