The Honest Company has become a beloved brand in many homes in its five-year history. But the consumer products business has also taken its lumps in 2016.

It’s currently fighting civil lawsuits brought against it by consumer show say they were misled by the company’s labeling of various products, including its laundry detergent and sunscreen.

Relatedly, Honest was called out by the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, after the outlet commissioned two independent lab tests of the company’s laundry detergent and determined it contained an ingredient — sodium lauryl sulfate — that’s commonly found in other products but that Honest has warned consumers not to use. (Honest has disputed the labs’ findings and said its detergent instead used a different compound called sodium coco sulfate. Still, it’s now reportedly reformulating its detergent without that second compound.)

The company also — gasp — failed to go public or get acquired this year, despite a Bloomberg report back in February that it was exploring an IPO with the help of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs and more recent reports (confirmed by TechCrunch) that it was talking with several big consumer products giants about a sale.

Among its reported suitors? Unilever, which soon after agreed to acquire a different product that makes “green” household products: Seventh Generation.

Presumably, each of these developments has been humbling for a young company that’s reportedly generating $300 million in annual revenue and was said to be valued at $1.7 billion in August 2015, when it raised its most recent round of funding from investors.

While Honest wasn’t the first consumer products outfit to market itself as safer and somehow more pure than its predecessors, it has garnered a lot of attention from customers, investors, and acquirers — as well as been a target for critics, it says — because of its star cofounder, actress Jessica Alba.

Not that the company is throwing in the towel. Far from it, Honest instead appears to be undergoing a shift, both away from its origins as an e-commerce business, and from the broader non-toxic household products that it was originally focused around. In fact, don’t be surprised if Honest eventually goes public or gets acquired as primarily a cosmetics company.

First, there’s the opportunity. While household products may be a much bigger market — and we aren’t suggesting that Honest will abandon the products it has already developed — the U.S. beauty and personal care market alone was reportedly valued at $80 billion last year.

It pays to sell lipstick. Estee Lauder, the New York-based maker of prestige women’s products, trades at a roughly $30 billion market cap right now. Meanwhile, Paris-based L’Oreal, one of the biggest personal care companies in the world, has a market cap of $93.6 billion.

One could also see how Honest, which became popular with parents willing to pay a premium to avoid certain chemicals, is evolving alongside Alba. Though she was a parent to two very young daughters when the company was founded in 2011, she may be less interested in selling diapers, detergent, and baby formula as her children grow up. Similarly, new parents may feel less of a connection to Alba than several years ago, both because her daughters are no longer babies, and because of the company’s mixed publicity this year.

 

Yet a bigger possible indicator that the company is switching up its strategy came last week when the fashion industry trade journal Women’s Wear Daily reported that Honest is cutting 80 employees, or roughly 14 percent of its workforce. Honest, it reported, is also parting ways with CFO and COO David Parker, and with cofounder and president Sean Kane, who is reportedly stepping back to start a new company but will stay on as an advisor.

Brian Lee, who is Honest’s CEO and another cofounder, told the WWD that the job cuts reflect Honest’s growing evolution away from its reliance on e-commerce and a focus on more offline channels. But Lee also mentioned wanting to grow Honest’s beauty business and to expand internationally, which are points that Honest’s chief marketing officer, Chris Thorne, also made on stage at our Disrupt show in New York earlier this year.

Honest “started as an online subscription e-commerce business, and now we’re in more than 6,000 retail locations, which has become a huge part of the business,” Thorne told us on stage. Asked which was growing more quickly — Honest’s e-commerce or retail businesses — he answered “both,” before adding: “It’s complicated to think about e-commerce and [lifetime value] cost of [acquiring a new customer] while building a brand story for people shopping at retail.”

Honest home products are currently being sold in Target, Costco, and Whole Foods locations. Costco sells three Honest products: shampoo and body wash, feminine liners, and lip gloss. Target sells dozens of Honest’s products, including prenatal vitamins, a variety of diapers and wipes, and a diaper bag made of polyurethane vegan leather. Whole Foods sells roughly eight Honest products, including body wash, hair conditioner, and a spray-on deodorant.

While significant, the company also launched a makeup and skin care line in September 2015 under the label Honest Beauty, and it seems to be making a push to make those products, which are available for order online, more widely available on shelves, too.

Though talk of its own retail locations has yet to be realized — other than running a pop-up store in L.A. for one year — Honest has been placing its hair care, skin care, and make-up products in a growing number of Ulta locations, a chain of beauty stores.

Honest Beauty also recently launched a hair-care line, and WWD reported in October that Honest Beauty is planning to  launch in Canada, as well as that it’s looking to move into Western Europe and Australia. (Ulta is U.S. based, so this will presumably require new partnerships.)

Honest Beauty is still a small business in the grand scheme of things. WWD has reported that according to is sources, the brand had reached “more than $10 million in retail sales” as of October. But WWD separately reported that it’s “upping its retail presence at Ulta by 20 percent” and that Honest Beauty recently hired celebrity makeup artist Daniel Martin as a creative color consultant to help with product development.

Will it grow to become Honest’s largest revenue stream? It’s too soon to know. And if Honest gets acquired any time soon, we may never find out. Faced with lawsuits over some of its other, household-related products, however — suits that Honest has described as “baseless” and having “no merit” — it’s easy to imagine that Honest might be having more fun developing lipsticks and hair sprays right now, and looking for any way to ensure that 2017 is a better year for the company than 2016 has been.