Carla Vernon

Carla Vernón is the CEO of The Honest Company, she was Vice President of consumables at Amazon. Through this appointment, Vernón will become one of the only Afro-Latina CEOs at a US publicly traded company. As CEO, she will be laser-focused on category growth and driving profitability behind the company’s core mission of inspiring everyone to love living consciously.
As Amazon’s Vice President of Consumables—a $56 billion portfolio including grocery, household products, and beauty—Carla Vernon is the highest-ranking woman of color at one of the world’s largest corporations.
She has been honing her talents as a performer since she was a young girl, chosen to be the ballet partner of the famous Arthur Mitchell, the first African-American dancer with the New York City Ballet and somebody Vernon calls “the Jackie Robinson of classical dance.”
A dance protégé and daughter of a microbiologist, Vernon took her talents to the American Academy of Ballet in Buffalo and then danced at Princeton, where she majored in ecology and evolutionary biology and continues to serve today as one of that university’s Trustees. At Princeton, she developed “a lifelong passion for the environment,” which she applied in the corporate world as the president of General Mills Natural & Organic. Vernon joined General Mills in 2008, leading business strategy for a $1.5 billion portfolio of snack brands including Nature Valley and Larabar. She quadrupled growth from +16% to +70% in six months. She also restored growth to the Nature Valley brand (the worlds top selling granola bar brand) resulting in the highest level of unit sales in the brand’s history.
Carla has served on the national Board of Directors for the Make-a-Wish Foundation and the Advisory Board for the Wisconsin School of Business’s Center for Brand and Product Management. She is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute and a member of The Alumni Society (for Latino senior leaders). Prior to joining General Mills, Carla worked for U.S. Senator Carol Moseley-Braun and The Nature Conservancy. Carla received her bachelor’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology from Princeton and a master’s in business administration from the University of Texas, Austin (as a Consortium Fellow)