Jessica Alba’s parking spot at the Honest Company, the four-year-old consumer-products start-up in Santa Monica, California, that wowed the tech community with a $1.7 billion valuation this summer, has a bright-green sign bearing her name. Before founding Honest, Alba was best known as the actress in roles such as a hip-hop choreographer with a heart of gold in 2003’s Honey and a strong-willed stripper in Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City franchise. I arrive for a tour at 3:32 P.M., and what transpires in the next 26 minutes is either a peek into Alba’s career as one of the tech world’s savviest businesswomen or the greatest performance of her acting career.
Alba’s cobalt-steel desk is part of an open-plan office that houses some of Honest’s almost 500 employees, all of whom have smiles on their faces and most of whom look to be in their 20s. “We hire a lot of people right out of college,” says Alba, whose current age, 34, makes her older than the office average. Next to Alba’s computer are towers of diapers featuring adorable cartoons. “It’s ‘the Paris collection,’ so we’re looking at French flags, the Eiffel Tower, a French bulldog that says ‘Le Woof.’ ” Alba approves the diapers but flags the tower’s salmon-colored packaging because the hue may skew too feminine for parents of boys. Behind her are new logo samples, each one a different shade of peach, but she’ll go through those later. She shows me a cozy, dimly lit room with scented candles where new mothers can pump their breast milk in private. And, in the hall, she overhears a conversation about a gifting suite the company may host at New York Fashion Week. She had hoped to create an editors’ lounge for makeup touch-ups and 15-minute massages but wonders if the $25,000 expense justifies the reach. (A single post viewed by her more than six million Instagram followers makes more of an impact.)
“Where’s the music up in here? Where’s RiRi and ‘Yonce?,” Alba shouts when we’re in the on-site photography studio. A mixed-race model with millions of adorable freckles is being photographed for a skin-care package and blushes when Alba gushes about her “modern beauty.” Alba suddenly checks the time and rushes the end of our tour, which includes the showroom, where new products are merchandised; the art department, where packaging is developed; the customer-service department, where employees answer up to 3,500 calls and e-mails per day.
And then, at exactly 3:58 P.M., Alba spins and says, “I’m sorry, but my four P.M. appointment is here.”
Director James Cameron, self-described god of the movie industry, gave Alba her big break in 1998 when he cast her as the lead in the short-lived TV series Dark Angel. He isn’t shocked by Honest’s success: “If you went back to the day I met Jessica and told me, ‘This girl is going to build a billion-dollar company,’ I would’ve said, ‘I believe it.’ ” Cameron’s production company auditioned more than 1,000 actresses for the part before he discovered her. Something about her glamorous sour puss made him press Pause. “She was slumped over with her hair in her face and a look of defiance. But when the camera hit her—wham!—there was such punk attitude.” (Alba admits she was a broody teenager—she has no Jell-O commercials in her credits.)
Dark Angel was set in the future (at the time, 2009 was the future), and her character, Max Guevera—a government-created, genetically enhanced super-soldier who escapes from a secret lab—presented Alba with more than a threat of stardom. “This was a $125 million production, and we were resting it on the shoulders of a teenager,” Cameron remembers. “She totally stepped up to the plate and didn’t fall or falter.” Alba worked 86-hour weeks in Vancouver, did many of her own stunts, and, Cameron adds, “never backed down from a fight. Early on, she had real integrity.”
Alba’s father, Mark, was in the U.S. Air Force and moved the family to Biloxi, Mississippi, and Del Rio, Texas, before settling in Southern California’s Inland Empire, where he started a real-estate company. Of her mother, Cathy, Alba says with pride, “There was nothing [she] didn’t do. She was the manager of a movie theater; she went to cosmetology school; she was a bartender, waitress, and then my manager.” Cathy began working at Honest last year and trains retail partners as a senior brand educator.
When Alba turned 11, most of her family—brother, four cousins, aunt, aunt’s sister, aunt’s sister’s boyfriend, and her mother—attended an open casting call at the Beverly Hills Studio. Thousands applied, but it was Jessica who received a year’s worth of acting classes, which she condensed into a summer so she wouldn’t miss school.
Alba’s childhood was marked by two things: illnesses—many of which she can now identify as asthma and allergy-related—that landed her in the hospital often, and a burning desire to leave a mark on the world, which at the age of 12 meant becoming a devout born-again Christian. “I was seeking a purpose,” Alba says of her years as a member of a conservative Christian youth group. “I wanted to exist for a reason.” This lasted until she was 17, when, she says, she was turned off by the boundaries and labels set by fellow churchgoers. That year, she attended an acting workshop in Vermont and “fell crazy in love with a cross-dressing ballet dancer who had a baby and was bisexual. I was like, ‘There’s just no way he’s going to hell!’ ” Acting opened her to a new world of creative people and a community where she belonged. “I felt like, at the end of the day, God is love and everyone is human.”
DARK ANGEL
“People doubted me as an actress, and that’s something that drove me,” says Alba.
Photograph by Carter Smith.
Returning to California, Alba made a pact with herself: “If I wasn’t going to get a big job by the time I was 18, I was going back to school.” According to plan, she was cast in Dark Angel in 1998, and she set out to approach her career “like my own Hollywood business.” She sought tentpole franchises, such as the Sin City films, 2004’s superhero thriller Fantastic Four, and her role as a crazy/flirty pharmaceutical rep in 2010’s Little Fockers. She gave her publicist a dictum that for every placement in a men’s magazine (such as one of *Maxim’*s hottest women) she wanted coverage in three women’s magazines. “People doubted me as an actress, and that’s something that drove me. I was not going to be pegged as an action-comic-book fangirl.” Hollywood wouldn’t be the only industry that underestimated Alba.
The Honest Company’s origins are now tech-world legend. When Alba was pregnant with her first daughter, Honor, now seven—husband and father is Cash Warren, a Yale graduate and a producer and tech investor—her friends threw a baby shower and she received a closetful of new baby clothes. When she washed her unborn baby’s onesies with a detergent her mother had recommended and broke out in hives, she was hysterical. “I was thinking, what if my baby has a reaction and I don’t know? What if her throat is closing? I had all this fear and anxiety because I was always so sick as a child.” That night she Googled every ingredient and discovered that some toxins can be labeled as “fragrance.” Her mission was clear: “I wanted safe and effective consumer products that were beautifully designed, accessibly priced, and easy to get.” Great idea, but how to implement it?
