The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.
2011
🌱
2011
Co-founded by Jessica Alba
Eco-friendly diapers, baby products and cleaning supplies, built on a promise about what's not in the bottle.
Wikipedia
Aug 2015
📈
Aug 2015
The peak: a $1.7B celebrity unicorn$1.7B
A funding round values the eco-friendly consumer brand at $1.7B, making it one of the era's marquee celebrity startups.
TechCrunch
2016
2016
The 'honest' label gets audited
Lab tests reported by the WSJ find a detergent ingredient the brand had pledged to avoid; quality controversies and lawsuits pile up.
WSJ
May 2017
💔
May 2017
Marked down — slips out of the club
A new private valuation of about $760M — less than half the peak — follows the controversies and stalling growth.
Wikipedia
May 2021
May 2021
A second act on Nasdaq
Goes public in May 2021, still below the 2015 peak; the stock slides after listing toward a market cap around $400M.
SEC filing
2023–24
💬
From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2023–24
With the shares near all-time lows, Glassdoor reviews from 2023-24 described recurring layoffs and restructuring, high turnover, and strategy that kept resetting through successive leadership changes — though many employees still praised the brand's mission and their colleagues.
Today
Today
Still in the club — and still trading
Live · HNST · NasdaqGSas of 2026-10-23
$4.80▼ 4.00% today≈ $515M cap · −69.7% from peak
💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.
How it happened
The Honest Company, co-founded by Jessica Alba, sells eco-friendly consumer and baby products and reached a roughly $1.7B valuation in 2015. After product-quality controversies and growth challenges, its private valuation was marked down to about $760M in 2017, dropping it out of the unicorn club ahead of its 2021 IPO.
Source: HNST; IPO May 2021, mkt cap ~$400M Jun 2026
Founders & leadership
Carla Vernon
current CEO
Still there — Chief Executive Officer and Board Director · LinkedIn ↗
