The CEOs of The Honest Company and NWSL talk about regaining the trust of consumers and employees
The CEOs of The Honest Company and NWSL talk about regaining the trust of consumers and employees
By Robert Safian | Published: 2025-11-03 21:00:00 | Source: Fast Company – technology
When a leader inherits a company in crisis, what decisions can he or she make to steady the ship and create positive change? The Honest Company CEO Carla Vernon and National Women’s Soccer League Commissioner Jessica Berman discuss counterintuitive approaches to earning employee trust after public scandals and share practical tips on reframing strategy.
This is a brief transcript of an interview with Rapid responsehosted by the former Fast company editor Bob Sofiane and recorded live at the 2025 Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. From the team behind Master’s degree in size podcast, Rapid response Features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders who are tackling challenges in real time. Subscribe to Rapid response Wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
Each of you has assumed your leadership roles in crises in many ways. The Honest Company has been facing public scrutiny over some of its products. Cash reserves were dwindling. Jessica, in the NWSL, there were accusations of sexual misconduct around the team, and the league’s culture was talked about as toxic.
I’ll start with you, Jessica. In those early days when you first get there, the players are on a rampage. “Let it burn,” says Megan Rapinoe. What do you do to address this from the beginning? I mean, I know you finally got a collective bargaining agreement that changed the relationship between players in the leagues, but how do you get them to a place where you can have that conversation?
Berman: Well, it’s certainly difficult to start a new job as a first-time commissioner, first-time CEO, and know that someone like Megan Rapinoe just posted on Twitter, “Let’s go.” He – she. Burn.” And she was talking about the league. . .
It is not a vote of confidence.
Berman: No, well, the league was really at a crossroads, and the crossroads was: Are we going to shut down and potentially restart? The history of this league is that three previous women’s professional football leagues have failed. Thus, this was a cycle that the sport had never known before. The alternative was to go and appoint a new commissioner and see if we could turn the situation around. And I think from my point of view there were actually two pieces.
First, I had a job when I got a call from the recruitment company. So I felt like I could be very honest and transparent with the players and actually with the Board of Governors that appointed me. I was asked to interview them, and I sat down with them and said, “Do you see a world where you can trust this institution?” Because if the answer is no, then I can become the best leader in the world. . .â€
It won’t matter.
Berman: . . . Then it won’t matter. And what I heard from the players was that even though they lacked confidence in the league and had a very, very long list of complaints to address, they actually wanted the league to succeed. What they expected was a leader who would show vulnerability and humility and actually join them in understanding their life experience. We really respect and understand the labor relationship, and that the foundation of professional sports in this country is the management-labor relationship. I am a business lawyer by training. Everyone always says: ‘Are you a footballer?’ I say no, I’m a labor lawyer. In fact, being a labor lawyer is what helped create the fabric and culture that we have reset at the NWSL.
Because you know building trust is about resetting that relationship through that collective bargaining agreement, giving the players a stake in a different way.
Berman: There is no business in professional sports without a constructive and productive relationship with your union and players.
So, Carla, you’ve joined Honest by Amazon.
Fernan: Yes.
A much larger entity. I managed a large portion of the business, including all consumables, household products, food and beverage, health and wellness and beauty. Then you come to The Honest Company as CEO, the team doesn’t know you, and the business is kind of on fire. In order to gain their trust, you brought in cartoon characters. Why cartoon characters, and what was that?
Fernan: Well, I feel like we have a lot in common in our story, Jessica. It’s important to support and say, for people who don’t know, an honest company is a company with specific goals. We were founded to deconstruct the personal care type of old school lens of things. So all our products are very cleanly designed to high standards of hygiene. Which means we attract a passion-driven and purpose-driven employee base. “And our employee base — 66% of my employees are millennials or Gen Z, so they’re younger. So I knew I couldn’t bring the tools that I had from legacy corporate America. I was working at General Mills, which is a 150-year-old company. Everything you can Google about leading a team through change . . .
She wasn’t going to work.
Fernan: Old American companies will not succeed. So, I’m a mother of teenagers, and I remember going to see that Inside outfirst movie with my kids. And I loved, as a mother, how it told me about the different parts of the emotional psyche, and how true it is, and how important it is to all of us. So I thought this might be a less institutional way to help employees feel normal about change and the fear or excitement they had about me as an outsider and what I represented. So this genre has become part of our culture.
Yes, now you are dealing with this kind of internal culture at the same time. You have this cash flow problem that you have to fix at the same time that you want to expand the brand. I mean it’s a tough balancing act, like we’re going to downsize but we’re going to expand.
Fernan: It may seem difficult, but in many cases, that old adage you hear, “less is more,” turns out to be true in business. It’s really helpful to identify the core elements of what you should do in business and what the people you serve really want from you, and in my case, from our brands. So some ability to say that we’re really going to decide what we’re not going to do as much as we’re going to decide what we’re going to do helped us open up the biggest parts of our portfolio — the parts that were the most profitable, the parts that were growing the most — and invest in them and really focus on them. The other thing we’ve done, Bob, is make sure that we have disciplined practices where we keep iterating and focusing on what’s most important and not worrying about the peripheral stuff.
I mean, it’s easy to say, but hard to do, right? Everyone, yeah, we’ll be disciplined, but we’re all distracted by anything.
Fernan: But if you’ve ever worked at Amazon, you’ll learn how to be disciplined.
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