The Honest Company, a baby and personal-care brand, has made significant changes over the past year to improve profitability, including exiting direct-to-consumer sales. Less visible have been changes to the company's finance division. The WSJ Leadership Institute's Kristin Broughton writes for today's newsletter:
In his first year as Honest's CFO, Curtiss Bruce strengthened the company's consumer-packaged-goods capabilities by hiring talent with expertise in areas including sales forecasting. Bruce, who also serves as chief operating officer, joined Honest in June 2025 from Hain Celestial, the tea and snack maker, where he served as senior vice president of financial planning and analysis. "The organization wasn't born as a CPG company," he said, pointing to Honest's prior focus on e-commerce.
Honest, which went public in 2021, is seeing results from its turnaround efforts: The company's gross margin jumped 8 percentage points in its latest quarter from a year earlier, to 48.4%. Bruce sat down with Kristin to talk about the results and his first year on the job. Here are edited highlights.
What changes did you make to the finance function to get to where you wanted to go?
When our strategy is about maximizing our growth platforms, expanding margin, there are some key capabilities that you need in order to do that.
There wasn't a focused sales finance team to partner with the sales organization in developing plans, developing forecasts, looking for ways to optimize. We didn't have a dedicated supply-chain finance team. And it's pretty tough to have a margin expansion goal, set targets and manage and measure that when you don't have a supply-chain finance person. And then we invested more into the finance team that was supporting what we call our operating units -- so, the brand teams that have P&L responsibility.
That's a lot, and in not a lot of time.
I'm so pleased with the talent that we have been able to attract. I think it says a lot about the brand -- and not only just attractiveness to consumers, but the attractiveness to professionals in the workforce.
What could other CFOs learn from your first year on the job?
A key learning for me as I went through my first year is, you know what the answer is. You need to just go do it. It's not going to get better. It's not going to get easier. Go do it, and you'll figure out the remaining 20%.
-- Kristin Broughton
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