'I Work Hard For My Money'

Jessica Alba Has Created A Business That’S Pushing The $ 2 Billion Dollar Mark . Cosmo’s Mel Evans Meets The Billion Dollar Babe Behind The Brand And Learns There’S A Very Honest Side To The Dynamo.

- Mel Evans

I bet there aren’t many people you’d pick up the phone for at 3.40am. If any. But on this particular morning in May, I’m making an exception. Because when Jessica Alba calls… you pick up.

It’s morning time in California, too, when I catch the actress cum-entrepreneur just out of a meeting. That is a meeting she ducked into after dropping her daughters, Honor, 8, and Haven, 5, off to school, and when we get off the phone she’ll dart into more meetings as the founder of The Honest Company. ‘Just a typical day,’ she tells me, nonchalant.

It still might be hard for you to imagine the Jessica Alba our generation knows best – the kickass femme in Dark Angel, Sin City and Fantastic Four – fronting a company that sells organic (honest) homewares, products and, now, beauty, let alone commanding a packed room of middle-aged men in suits. But if her past résumé has taught us anything, it’s that she’s no wilting flower – on screen and in the office. And she learnt to play this game early.

‘Because I was well known as someone in entertainment, it was harder for the average Joe to see me as anything but that,’ she says of the early days of The Honest Company. ‘But with people from a business perspective, the best thing you can do is show respect; the proof is in the pudding. If anyone sat down with me for 10 minutes, they’d know I get my hands dirty.’

Since forming The Honest Company in 2011, Alba, 36, has turned the ‘unicorn’ start-up – the Silicon Valley term for the holy grail of start-ups valued at more than $1 billion – into an empire estimated by