When Carla Vernón joined baby and personal care brand The Honest Company as CEO last year, she knew many challenges lay ahead.

While a CPG veteran, it was her first time as chief exec of any company, let alone one that had just gone public two years prior (and garnered more attention than most given its co-founder is Jessica Alba). The company had also faced a turbulent 2022 with dipping sales. That meant Vernón had to build up her own skill set while also hitting reset on the brand’s retail strategy to boost consumer penetration, she told Retail Brew.

“I had a lot of reason to believe the brand could scale, and just hadn’t scaled yet,” she said.

Vernón spent more than 20 years at General Mills, holding many roles including head of its natural and organic division, overseeing the Annie’s brand. She then headed to Amazon, serving as VP of consumables categories, overseeing health and personal care, grocery, baby, and beauty.

Since taking over at Honest, Vernon has executed a transformation initiative that led to 10% YoY revenue growth in 2023, and consistent YoY growth each quarter this year, up 10% to $93 million in Q2 and 15% to $99 million in Q3, pushing the company to raise its full-year outlook to high-single-digit growth last month. Vernón shared the keys to her mission to—in the company’s words—“transform and strengthen” the business since she took the reins to set Honest up for a 2025 focused on acceleration.

In good company: When she joined Honest, Vernón got the feeling that “cars were moving in too many directions—and that is no way to quickly improve a business model,” she said.

Keep reading here.—EC

Move over, Barbenheimer—Glicked is upon us. Please secure an AR-enabled Gladiator arena popcorn bucket, or perhaps one shaped like a lantern for Wicked, to celebrate.

That’s the habit that theater chains are trying to get movie fans accustomed to each time a major release rolls around.

Since the pandemic upended the moviegoing business, theaters have gotten more creative with their offerings in an effort to entice ticket buyers. Accompanying upgraded seats and fancier food is a perhaps unexpected star: the specialty popcorn bucket, usually a themed, over-the-top receptacle to hold the iconic movie snack. The novelty item, which has been offered for titles like Alien: Romulus, Mean Girls, and Despicable Me 4, is aimed at building out the cinema experience to create an emotional memory to encourage customers to return to the theater, according to Wanda Gierhart Fearing, chief content and marketing officer at Cinemark.

“We wanted our customers to have something that they could take home…after the movie that would just bring that memory back,” Gierhart Fearing told Marketing Brew.

Keep reading here.—JN

Buckle up, world. The supply chain disruptions of recent years aren’t stopping anytime soon.

“The world is far more volatile, [and] getting more volatile all the time,” Ted Stank, co-executive director of the Global Supply Chain Institute at the University of Tennessee Knoxville’s Haslam College of Business, told CFO Brew.

Even as supply chain disruptions become increasingly visible, there’s a reason supply chains stay out of sight and mind most of the time.

“I always tell students, supply chains are like a bunch of dominoes, and they all have to fall down, right? If you take one domino out of that chain, the whole chain fails, and supply chains are like that,” Lance Saunders, a professor of supply chain management at UTK’s Haslam College, told CFO Brew. “Most people don’t see that because supply chains work, and it’s because they work most of the time [that] you’re not seeing all those steps that have to happen to make that package show up at your door.”

But when they don’t? Oof. Supply chain disruptions have fairly obvious cost implications, Stank and Saunders noted: Missed sales, increased transportation and inventory costs, paying overtime for workers, operating plants on double or triple shifts due to closures elsewhere.

This article isn’t about those costs, though. It’s about everything CFOs may be overlooking while scrambling to address those costs.

Keep reading here.—NP