How Jessica Alba earned 200 millions on diapers

She is one of the richest women in America to succeed on her own. Alba has made a fortune in a completely foreign industry.

As it was with many brilliant ideas, the concept The Honest Company born out of unmet need. In 2008, Jessica Alba was engaged to Internet entrepreneur Cash Warren and was expecting her first child. Friends and relatives piled it with childish things, and on the advice of her mother she decided to clean the mountain of slippers received as a gift in a special tool for babies. She took advantage of one of the well-known brands, but immediately became covered with terrible red spots - as in childhood, when she was dragged away by doctors because of a rash on her skin.

“She was a very sensitive child,” recalls her mother Katie Alba, meaning not at all the emotional state of her daughter.

Jessica grew up at US Air Force bases in Biloxi, Mississippi, and Del Rio, Texas. She had severe allergies and asthma, which often caused pneumonia and often ended up in the hospital.

And now, when she was sprinkled again, Jessica realized that even a child could be born allergic. And then she conducted an audit of all the funds that stood in her bathroom and in the kitchen, using Google and Wikipedia studying their composition. “I thought: can it be safe for a child if I myself react like that?” She says.

The results of the investigation horrified her: oil products, formaldehyde, flame retardants contained literally in everything: from floor washing liquid to mattresses.

Something was directly written on the label, something was hidden under the cover of the harmless word "flavor".

Armed with printouts from the Internet and determined to protect her unborn child, Alba went shopping. But she was disappointed: to find natural ecological products for reasonable money that wouldn’t have been intended for crazy vegans willing to live in a hut was not so easy. “I haven’t found anything that suits me,” she says. - I am a modern person. I need the design to be beautiful, and the composition is safe, and the price is not luxury. ”

She tried to create a detergent from baking soda, vinegar and essential oils, but it turned out to be a salad dressing. And then she asked what to buy, to Christopher Gavigan, who for seven years headed a non-profit organization Healthy Child Healthy World ("Healthy child, healthy world").

Gavigan told that there are companies, for example seventh generation from Vermont, which are considered “green” and do develop good products in some product categories, but there is not a single umbrella brand under which the line of environmentally friendly products is produced. “No one wants to deal with all this toxicology on his own,” he says. “Everybody wants someone to take them by the hand and lead them along.”

Very little time passed, and now Alba and Gavigan in the evenings and on weekends, sipping wine, prepare a business plan and buy domain names that include the word honest ("honest").

Through her husband, the actress met network businessman Brian Lee, a lawyer and co-founder of a successful legal support project. Legalzoom.com.

“I briefly brought her up to date and wished her success,” Li said. In 2009, he got acquainted with Jessica’s 50-page presentation in Power point, but not interested in the idea. Now he says that he was just very busy developing the “shoe” project with Kim Kardashian ShoeDazzle.com. Alba, meanwhile, made a career in Hollywood, starring in the films “Valentine's Day”, “Meet the Fockers” and “Machete” (all three were released in 2010 year).

Alba's husband Kesh Warren also had to immerse himself in Alba's new hobby. “I did not know anything about all these chemicals that were contained in consumer goods, and she taught me a lot,” he says. “At first it was complicated, I didn’t want to do this, but Jessica went into this business with her head.”

In 2011, she came back to Brian Lee with new data on the increase in incidence among children and with a much more detailed 10-page presentation in slides. By that time, Lee himself had a different attitude to this idea. He was frightened that his son was forbidden to bring American peanut butter and jam sandwiches to kindergarten. Many children, it turns out, had a severe nut allergy. “Autism, nervous disorders, chronic allergies and asthma, celiac disease are all on the rise,” says Lee. - For me, the moment of awareness has come. Why are we not doing anything about it? ”

Lee and Alba invested $ 6 million in a startup, having managed to attract another investor (a source close to the deal said this; the company did not disclose where the initial investments came from and how the shares are currently distributed). New company got the name The Honest Company - This is an allusion to the values ​​that it shares, and to the availability of information on the composition of products.

The Honest Company started with diapers and still they provide a significant share of sales: about 75% of revenue comes from sales via the Internet, and most often they buy diaper packages for a whole month for $ 79,95 and wet wipes.

When Alba was looking for safe baby detergents in the stores, she often wondered why no one had the idea to make seasonal drawings for diapers. “I wanted to see something witty on them,” she recalls. “And natural diapers: why do they look like they were wearing a paper bag?”

When Alba's first daughter Onor was born in the summer of 2008, the second, Heven, was born in 2012, she often found herself in a situation where the diapers suddenly ended at night. She was excited about the idea of ​​creating a subscription-based service for the sale of non-toxic essential goods for the house — detergents, diapers, etc.

That was long before the startup appeared. Birchbox, which sells sets of cosmetics for a month, and the model itself of such a business was still missing.

To create a scratch-free, non-toxic consumer product business from scratch, while not having the infrastructure, such as Procter & Gamble or Kimberly-Clark, investments in excess of $ 6 million received as a seed were required. And so the founders began to look for venture capital for a diaper business. “We started with one product,” recalls Lee. “It was a strategic decision, we understood that in this way we discover the way to every home.”

When the actress herself does not have enough time to travel around the country and train retailers, a second person in the company comes to the rescue - her mother. A year ago, Katie Alba joined the team. The Honest Company, and now two weeks a month tells department store managers Whole Foods and Buy Buy Baby about how her daughter fights against childhood diseases. Actually, Katie has already reached retirement age, but can not sit back. “I am a lot like Jessica,” she says. “I need all or nothing.”