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Deciem is arguably one of the most talked-about beauty companies in the industry right now. The almost five-year-old company is most famously home to inexpensive skincare line The Ordinary, a favorite of Kim Kardashian, Racked, and most of the Skincare Internet. Deciem produces several other beauty lines like NIOD and Hylamide, but thanks to The Ordinary, which sells its effective formulas for less than $15, the company has grown tremendously. Last year, Deciem opened several new stores, including its first US store in New York City. In June, Estée Lauder became a minority investor. In December, The Ordinary launched in Sephora.
Since The Ordinary took off, the company has been plagued with product shortages. It manufactures its own products, and demand has been high since the beginning. The company, which prides itself on transparency, frequently acknowledged the shortages on social media. Customers grumbled, mostly with affection, and patiently waited for their $6 Niacinamide + Zinc serums to arrive.
Brandon Truaxe is the founder and CEO of the company, which is headquartered in Toronto and has additional offices in the United Kingdom and New York. Co-CEO Nicola Kilner is based in London. She notes that the company has grown from about 100 employees last year to almost 500. Kilner has been with the company since almost the beginning and came from a corporate background at Boots, a large UK pharmacy chain.
As a leadership team, the two seem to be yin and yang. Truaxe is a fast talker who’s prone to wandering tangents and can be intense. He dubbed Deciem “The Abnormal Beauty Company,” he refers to all the employees as monkeys, and he touts the brand’s transparency. Kilner, on the other hand, stays on message and exudes an earnest cheerfulness. She genuinely seems to love the company and its founder. “I think Brandon is a genius, he is different, and the reason I think Deciem is where it is is because he’s quirky, he’s so creative, and he thinks differently [from] others,” she says.
But Deciem has been enduring a bit of a PR crisis thanks to Truaxe, whose messages on the company’s Instagram page became progressively more personal over the last few weeks. He has said in the past that he has always written the posts, which tend to be wordy and quirky. But recently the page veered into bizarre territory, subsequently shining a more intense spotlight on the company and how it’s run.
It all started with an unprovoked spat via a social media ad with fellow indie beauty brand Drunk Elephant. Truaxe took a swipe at the price of his competitor’s marula oil, which costs about six times the amount of The Ordinary’s. People noticed, and he apologized and donated $25,000 to an elephant charity. In subsequent posts he announced he was going to “cancel all of our marketing plans,” discontinued Deciem’s scalp care line Stemm because it was “too expensive and we rushed through it,” and changed his title from CEO to “Worker.” Then came seven pictures of garbage (and one dead animal), with the repeated vow to get rid of the company’s plastic packaging.
During the course of all this, he tossed out orders and instructions to his employees via Instagram, even offering to sponsor his (now former) plastics provider to come to Canada to work. He also used a post to cut ties with his UK-based partner, “cosmetic doctor” Dr. Tijion Esho, with whom he produced lip care line Esho. The post has since been deleted. In a subsequent statement sent to Racked, Dr. Esho said, in part, “While I am disappointed to have not been told prior to the public announcement on Deciem’s social media that my line is being discontinued, I do believe that as one door closes another opens. For Esho, this line of products is only the beginning.”
“We had some feedback from customers that they didn’t like the taste,” says Kilner. She confirms that Truaxe posted without first speaking to Dr. Esho, though she could not really offer an explanation for why he did this on Instagram instead of talking to Dr. Esho privately, although did say he “wants to live in this transparent world.” “I spoke to TJ this morning at length. We weren’t doing [Esho] justice because we didn’t have the time to. We were struggling with The Ordinary and moving. The plate was too full and something had to drop off, and that was the thing that did.”
Kilner confirmed the Deciem Instagram account lost about 5,000 followers over the few days that this was going on. Since then, Truaxe, who is now in Africa, has taken to posting over on a personal account for the first time and is seemingly laying low for a bit. Of all the hoopla, he said in an email statement, “I’m in a happy place and am ignoring anyone who’s unhappy about it. Loving people will see me and Deciem for who we are. Unhappy ones will eventually rely on logic to make purchasing decisions regardless of their irrational criticisms. And logic is on our side because we make good products that are affordable.”
Because of all this increased scrutiny on the company, people started posting links to bad Glassdoor reviews; the first one was written in 2015. Out of 32 reviews, 14 are glowing and 18 are downright terrible, alleging things like bullying, yelling in the office, nepotism, sexual harassment, and that management asks people to write positive reviews. At least half of the bad ones focus on the lack of organization and reporting structure. Like any anonymous internet entity, Glassdoor should be considered unreliable at best. Kilner denies that the company ever asked employees to write positive reviews to bury the negative ones.
Racked spoke to three former employees, all of whom requested anonymity. Each worked at the Toronto facility between 2016 and 2017 and confirmed some of the Glassdoor allegations. “I think it’s a great concept. In the beginning they really sell this idea of this big family,” one says. “It was good in theory, I’ll say that. But it’s just not how it actually is. It’s just incredibly disorganized.” Kilner agrees with the characterization that Deciem can be disorganized.
“It’s a startup that has grown very quickly. That means there’s not always a structure, there’s not always a hierarchy, directions can change,” she says. Employees do get new titles and responsibilities. She also doesn’t deny a degree of turnover. “There’s turnover in the early stage, and often that’s driven by us or it’s just not a right fit,” she says.
The former employees say they had heard management, including Truaxe, yelling at employees. “It was an old building, so you could pretty much hear almost everything that was happening upstairs. There would be quite a few times where you would hear him yelling. It never really sounded good,” says one. “I quit because eventually it was just too much drama and it just didn’t seem worth it. If you were on Brandon’s good side, you were solid.”
Kilner denies that Truaxe yells at people, at least in anger. “The thing is, he’s so passionate. He yells when he’s happy. He’s never ever yelled at me, ever,” she says. “Any time he’s raised his voice it’s because he’s so passionate, but usually it’s positive and he’s like, ‘Oh my god, look at this.’” Stephen Kaplan, the CFO, also characterized Truaxe as “passionate,” saying on a call, “He’s strong as a leader and he does care for people.” One of the former employees did also say, “[Brandon] comes off as a very honest and transparent person... he does seem empathetic.”
The three former employees also say they witnessed and experienced inappropriate and unprofessional behavior from other managers. Deciem manufactures its own products, and there are two shifts that work in the Toronto factory. The factory is managed by Meena Razack and Riyadh Swedaan. About 140 employees work in the main facility.
The employees say that when they worked there, the two managers would openly discuss people’s weight and bodies. Two of the employees describe Razack “pinching” their stomachs. “She just comes up to you and grabs your rolls,” says one. A second one says, “I remember once I was sitting on a chair and [she] came up to me and pinched my stomach fat. And I turned around and she was laughing and everyone was there, and that was, like, normal behavior in the office.” (These employees worked there at the same time and say they discussed these incidences after they happened.)
Swedaan may now be known to Deciem fans (possibly as “Riad,” as that’s how Truaxe refers to him on social media) because he made an appearance on the brand’s Instagram this week, traveling with Truaxe. Truaxe wrote in the long post, “...Riad is not my boyfriend (I’m not gay). He’s my brother and I love him (and his beautiful mother who’s my mother). Because of Estée Lauder’s investment, I have been able to give the family a gift of $500,000 in January. They’re building a home. And Riad is now travelling [sic] the world with me until March.”
Swedaan was described by two of the former employees as a “bully” and by one as “a huge problem. I would say one of the main reasons for the turnover rate there would be him.” They describe him berating and yelling at employees, sometimes using profanity.
A fourth employee, who had worked at Deciem since its inception and left in November 2017 to travel, had a different experience. She denies that Truaxe ever yelled at employees, and she says of Swedaan, “I don’t mean to dismiss [other employees’s] experiences, but mine was the complete opposite. We disagreed on a lot of stuff, but he’s just such a sweetheart and he’s such a generous person.” She says she would absolutely work there again and praised Truaxe’s open door policy.
A representative said in an email, “We have nothing to hide and invite anyone who’s interested in learning more to visit us at our Toronto HQ.”
Kaplan says he was hired in mid-2017 to provide more structure within the company. Human resources, which consists of a manager and two employees at the Toronto office and one other remotely, reports to him. He says he has not received any complaints about Swedaan or Razack since he started, nor has he witnessed the behavior described here. Of Swedaan, he says, “I haven’t directly seen him berate people at all. I haven’t seen that. I know he’s firm. I know he’s organized.” And of Razack: “Meena is very maternal, and I think that’s the balance we have between her and Riyadh. That comment surprised me. I’ve never seen it, that’s for sure.”
Being put under the microscope seems to have prompted a certain level of self-awareness in the company. “We definitely have grown too quickly, there’s no question, and that’s part of why I was brought on,” says Kaplan, who will be bringing in more formalized training programs. “If you see a constant thread you know you’ve got to look at those issues, and I’m not ignoring anything. We will work through it and I will try to bring a bit more structure. That’s what’s really needed here, and a little bit of a reporting hierarchy so that people do know who they report to and who’s responsible for what. If you’re smaller it’s okay, you can handle it. But as you grow and have more operations that aren’t in one location, you need to step up your organization.”
Fans of the brand questioned Estée Lauder’s involvement in Deciem, especially because one of the posts mentioned its investment. Estée Lauder has a minority stake and isn’t involved in company operations at all, though Kilner says the conglomerate did call to offer her “support with PR” in light of the attention the company has been getting. “We couldn’t have asked for a better partner. They’re still the kind of place where we ring them when we need advice. It’s just having a good link where if we need a contact with someone or we need an introduction or we want some advice, they’re there, but outside of that they let us get on with what we’re doing,” she says. Estée Lauder declined to comment for this story.
In the meantime, Kilner says there is no official social media team. Truaxe still writes the posts, and questions that come up about a skincare regimen or orders are answered by the customer service team. Kilner confirms that the company is not doing traditional advertisements anymore, since they were mainly done to support accounts like Boots in the UK and pharmacies in Australia. (Deciem is slowly moving its products out of pharmacies.) She also confirms that it recently shut down the company’s Twitter account since it seemed to be attracting mostly customer service questions, which the company would rather handle via email and a new live chat on the website. After Truaxe posted that he was getting rid of marketing, rumors started spreading about entire teams being fired. Kaplan says this is not true, since there wasn’t a marketing team in the first place. He did say that two digital employees left; one resigned and one was let go because of the change in marketing direction.
Kilner acknowledges that the team has, on occasion, “rushed to hire rather than take the time, and that’s where our downfall is, probably — going too quickly compared to the corporates.” Some areas of slowdown are imminent. Deciem produces the skincare for the London-based home goods store The White Company, which also has an outpost in NYC. In addition to divesting Esho and stopping Stemm for the moment, the company confirms it is “working on transitioning [The White Company] out of our portfolio.”
Kilner says Deciem hopes to have a new facility open in April, along with a second manufacturing facility to “cope with the demand” of The Ordinary. It also still plans to launch the Abnomoly line, a range featuring unusual products that defy categorization. Truaxe is also working on a separate project called Avestan, which Kilner says will feature fragrances that evoke journeys to different places.
Kaplan says, “Brandon’s a very smart guy, he’s very driven. Money doesn’t seem to be the motivator for him, and I think he’s trying shake up the industry, which he already seems to have done with The Ordinary.”
Update: February 9th, 2018, 12:37 p.m.
Following publication, Deciem provided Racked with the following statement:
“Transparency isn’t just about products and ingredients. We have always welcomed anyone into our Toronto home to experience Deciem and the loving people that make up our team. Our new facility will be 4x the size of our current space and feature a wrap-around glass walk-way to encourage consumers to see us for who we are.”
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