SXSW: Even Jessica Alba Had Challenges With A Startup

Editor’s note: Emily Reeves, director of digital innovation and insight planning for advertising powerhouse Stone Ward, will be providing contributions to Talk Business & Politics from the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive festival in Austin this week. She is providing additional content on her observations from SXSW at Stone Ward’s Waiting For The Elevator blog.

Launching a business is hard, even for a celebrity like Jessica Alba.

As the story goes, Alba went on a search for safe baby products that were also high quality, but could not find exactly what she wanted. With an entrepreneurial mindset, she decided that she needed to create the products and the company on her own. And The Honest Company was born.

Of course, it was not that easy.

She pitched the idea to VCs for three years and was turned down repeatedly. A 30-plus-page deck with a lot of words and numbers on it ended in meetings with confused looks and an idea no one really understood.

It was when she partnered with Brian Lee — of LegalZoom and Shoe Dazzle fame — that the pitch was refined to nine slides with images and graphs, and the idea finally was funded.

Using the investment dollars, Jessica, Brian and the other business partners worked on the products, the business and the website. Finally, Jessica was set to appear on Good Morning America at 8 a.m. on launch day to introduce the business. And a beta version of the website launched at 7:40 a.m. that morning — untested and unseen.

Keep in mind, this was an e-commerce website that would accept money and was about to be introduced (and likely visited) by millions of people across America.

As someone who works in web development, this is both jaw-dropping and satisfying to learn: websites, as with any technology, are constantly being worked on, tweaked and perfected. There are always glitches, it always takes longer than expected and there are usually nail-biting moments when it goes live. When Jessica and Brian shared this story, I had a “Stars: They Are Just Like Us!” moment.

The site held up under the Good Morning America traffic, but they realized five days later that while the site was accepting credit cards, they were not actually charging and processing payments to the credit cards. So the first five days of orders were basically free, and not purposely.

Needless to say, the business survived the rocky start and has expanded from 17 products to 117 products.

Alba credits their success to making decisions based on customer feedback.

With 5,000-7,000 calls a day and a highly engaged social consumer (they claim a 20% engagement from their one million Facebook fans), the Honest customers tell the company what they like, don’t like and what they want. And The Honest Company responds, rapidly iterates and keeps their customers satisfied.