A consumer goods company founded by popular actress Jessica Alba is the latest company to file for a listing on the public markets. That company is The Honest Company, which was started ten years ago by a team led by Alba.

With Alba’s popularity, she helped steer The Honest Company into a high sphere of popularity that has brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. The company sells a variety of household products with a major pitch of being eco-friendly.

The Honest Company has filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an initial public offering. As usual, the S-1 filing gives a strong insight into the company’s business with information not publicly known before.

• The Honest Company made $301 million in revenue in 2020, compared to $236 million in 2019. The company isn’t profitable, reporting a net loss of $14.5 million in 2020 and $31 million in 2019.

• The Honest Company on Friday filed to sell $100 million worth of shares on the public markets, although that’s usually a placeholder used to calculate filing fees and is likely to change.

• The Honest Company is a high-growth consumer goods success story that undoubtedly drew much strength from the social capital of its founder Jessica Alba. Over its 10 years of existence, the company raised over half a billion dollars in venture funding from a mix of big-name investors.

• Though, The Honest Company hasn’t been without its struggles and controversies. In 2016, it was valued at as high as $1.7 billion by investors but saw that valuation cut by over half after a series of product recalls, public backlashes, and class action lawsuits originating from an expose by The Wall Street Journal that the company misled customers about the ingredients and eco-friendliness of its products.

• After its struggles, a new CEO was brought in to lead The Honest Company, being Nikolaos Vlahos who was formerly the COO of consumer goods giant The Clorox Company. Under his leadership, The Honest Company has stabilized and now seen itself fit to hit the public markets.

• The Honest Company is rumored to be targeting a valuation of around $2 billion on the public markets. It has filed to list on the Nasdaq stock exchange with the trading symbol “HNST”.

Photo credit: TechCrunch, licensed under CC BY 2.0

More News:

Big Fraud

• The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has busted an alleged $690 million+ Ponzi scheme operated by a Hollywood actor. It’s charged 1nMM Capital, LLC and its founder Zachary Horwitz with deceiving investors that they were buying film rights and purpotedly reselling them to Netflix and HBO when in fact there wasn’t any established relationships with these companies.

• Los Angeles-based actor Zachary Horwitz allegedly showed investors fabricated agreements and emails regarding purported deals with HBO and Netflix and promised investors returns in excess of 35%. Instead, he ‘for many years’ paid returns on earlier investments using funds from new investments, the exact definition of a ponzi scheme.

• Horwitz is also charged with misappropriating investor funds for his personal use, including the purchase of a multi-million dollar home, trips to Las Vegas, and to pay a celebrity interior designer.

Blacklist

• Under the Biden administration, it’s apparent that the US is maintaining regular blacklists of Chinese companies accused of having ties to the country’s military that was started by the former Trump administration. 

• Freshly, the US Commerce Department has added seven Chinese supercomputing firms to the “Entity List” which prohibits American exports to such companies without permission from the government.

• “Supercomputing capabilities are vital for the development of many – perhaps almost all – modern weapons and national security systems, such as nuclear weapons and hypersonic weapons. The Department of Commerce will use the full extent of its authorities to prevent China from leveraging U.S. technologies to support these destabilizing military modernization efforts.” U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said in a statement.

Union

• E-commerce giant Amazon has emerged victorious in the widely-watched push for warehouse workers to unionize in the state of Alabama. Warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama overwhelmingly voted against unionizing to the surprise of many.

• Had the union vote succeeded, it would have set a precedent for Amazon workers in other places across America to push for unionization. It emerged as a victory for Amazon which has been vehemently against unionization across its American workforce and taken to controversial browbeat tactics such as surveillance to ensure that.

Share this...

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Linkedin

Whatsapp

Email

Print