Carla Vernón

Company: The Honest CompanyTitle: Board Director & CEOIndustry: Consumer productsNotable in 2024: Vernón brought renewed focus on brand maximization and margin enhancement to The Honest Company and initiated a return to long-term growth.

Carla Vernón has spent decades as an executive in the consumer industry, overseeing household essentials, wellness, beauty, baby, and food and beverage for Amazon, and before that, natural and organic products for General Mills. But it wasn't until January 2023 that she was given the chance to run a public company.

Vernón was named CEO of The Honest Company, the personal care brand founded by actress Jessica Alba in 2011, that has become a go-to for many consumers across product categories including baby, cleaning, and beauty, with a brand and focus built on eco-friendly ingredients. The brand leads with its "No list" – 3,500 ingredients that the company will not use in products.

"I have always wanted to use my talents to do good work, but at places where I can do that work on a big scale because the world has big problems," Vernón said in an interview with the BBC. "When the opportunity came to help lead and grow Honest, which was born as a purpose-driven company, it spoke to me because I knew I wanted to attract a workforce that also wanted to use their day jobs to do good in the world."

Taking over Honest also meant taking on some big challenges. The company, which went public during the Covid IPO boom of 2021 at a valuation of $1.4 billion, has lost more than half of its value since the deal, with a market cap now sitting around $600 million. Slowing sales in 2022 and 2023, higher costs leading to larger financial losses, and the need to raise prices due to inflation, hit the company hard, and were among the issues Vernón inherited. Alba left her position as chief creative officer in the middle of 2024, but that high-profile departure did come amid signs of a business rebound.

In the final quarter of 2023, the company reversed its sales decline and eked out a profit. As of the company's last earnings report in November 2024, Honest had posted its highest quarterly revenue, with $99 million in sales, up 15% year-over-year, and scoring big wins through partners including Target and Amazon – its wipes were among the 100 top-selling products on the last Prime Day.

The company has continued to improve its gross margins since Vernón joined, posting a fourth-consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA through Q3 2024, and was confident enough to raise its guidance in November, the second time it had done so last year. It has forecast sales that will continue to grow high single-digits year over year. Cutting product and supply chain costs to come better into line with sales helped the company's shares to rebound from their lowest point – as low as $1 in 2023 – but they remain well below the nearly $20 share price of trading on IPO day.

As one of the first Afro-Latina chief executive officers of a U.S. publicly traded company, Vernón has worked to increase the company's diversity, with a board that is now 66% female and 56% people of color. In recent years, and especially since President Trump was reelected, DEI has been under constant attack, but as a consumer industry veteran, Vernón sees a diverse company as critical to hitting sales growth goals in an America where the demographics are changing: "more single parent households, more people of color, more black and brown families, more intersectional families," she told the BBC.

"Our company believes that we thrive better as a consumer-packaged goods company that reflects the people who buy our products," she said in an episode of The Leadership Dance. "By being people who've always had to see that duality in life and maybe see subtext that others don't, sometimes it's a superpower we have," Vernón said. "I think being different means that I'm resilient in corporate America."

As Vernón has proven at The Honest Company, she isn't one to back down from a challenge.

Correction: The Honest Company's wipes were among the 100 top-selling products on the most recent Amazon Prime Day. An earlier version of this article misstated that fact.