Vernón Departs Amazon To Serve as The Honest Company CEO
Longtime CPG leader and former General Mills’ executive Carla Vernón is heading to The Honest Company to serve as the supplement, baby, beauty and cleaning supplies company’s new CEO.
Vernón will assume the role from outgoing CEO Nick Vlahos, who will remain on the board of directors for the roughly decade-old brand. She will begin at the Los Angeles-based company on January 9, with Vlahos remaining as a consultant through the end of May.
“As I take my seat at the table as a woman, a mom, and one of the only Afro-Latina CEOs of a U.S. public company, there are so many people and experiences that come with me. These are perspectives that can inspire our future growth and vision. That is what is so unique about The Honest Company,” Vernón said in a release. “This brand was built to bring a rumble of change across industries, leading the way to bring clean and ethical products to the mainstream.”
Most recently Vernón served as the VP of consumables categories for online retailer Amazon, where she oversaw the food, beverages, health, wellness, beauty, cleaning and babycare segments, and led the category to double-digit topline growth. During her tenure, Vernón collaborated with The Honest Company in 2021 to launch a “fully digital-first version of the brand’s store” on Amazon.com.
An advocate for increasing diversity in the natural products space, Vernón previously spent over two decades at General Mills in a variety of roles including VP of the snacks division and VP of yogurt. In the years directly before she headed to Amazon, Vernón served as division president of the company’s natural and organic business, which included the Annie’s, Cascadian Farm, Muir Glen, and EPIC Provisions brands, helping lead General Mills to become the second largest branded maker of natural and organic foods, a release noted.
Vernón is expected to relocate from her home in Minnesota to California, an SEC filing indicates.
Publicly traded, The Honest Company’s hundreds of products are sold online and in over 50,000 retail stores. The company’s stock began trading at $2.85 a share today. Following the announcement of Vernón’s hiring, the stock rose to $2.92 a share, as of press time, but is still below the roughly $19 a share it opened with on the NASDAQ in May 2021.
