Face Lift: Inside Beauty Brand Deciem’s Ambitious Comeback
In the heart of downtown Toronto, where the industrial buildings of the Liberty Village neighborhood have found new life as lofts, condos, gyms, restaurants, and co-working spaces, a two-story structure is mid-renovation. “I think it was briefly a porn studio,” Nicola Kilner says, describing the 70,000-square-foot space that also moonlighted as a suit factory before urban manufacturing declined. Kilner, the CEO of Deciem—which launched in 2013 as a multi-brand personal-care concept and now produces eight different skin-care, grooming, beauty, and supplement brands, all in-house, all befitting its tagline: “the abnormal beauty company”—is leading me on a tour of her new headquarters. An office and split-level lab will soon open at the top of a massive staircase, she explains as we look out onto the ground floor—a hangar-like space that will multitask as a production facility, and a flagship store stocked with its full product lineup, including best sellers from popular skin-care lines The Ordinary and NIOD (Non-Invasive Options in Dermal Science).
There are as many workers in hard hats and safety vests as Deciem employees, who are clustered in a temporary open-floor-plan work area.
Deciem’s founder, Brandon Truaxe—an Oscar Wilde–meets–Elon Musk figure who helped build it into a global force (at the beginning of 2020, the company will have 40 stores from Los Angeles to Hong Kong)—found the building a couple of years ago as its growth was cresting. The Ordinary’s lineup of clinical-grade ingredients at strikingly low price points (30ml of 10% resurfacing Lactic Acid or 2% hydrating Hyaluronic Acid for just $6.80) took off in 2016 as consumer interest in high-performance skin care exploded. Social media were also key to the company’s success, allowing Deciem to engage with a sizable community of beauty obsessives—fans, editors, influencers—as Truaxe himself regularly slid into Instagram comment sections to answer questions from 300,000-plus followers.
But last year, Truaxe’s online and workplace behavior became erratic. He publicly antagonized competitors and customers, threatened to shut down store locations with little reason, and abruptly laid off members of his executive team without warning, including Kilner. “2018 was hideous, the worst you could ever imagine,” she says earnestly as we sit in a high-ceilinged boardroom, her British accent exhausted by a bout of bronchitis. Truaxe’s actions, reportedly linked to drugs and mental health issues (Truaxe vehemently denied he was mentally ill), became spectacle, tracked by gossip and beauty blogs—and eventually major news organizations—until he died unexpectedly in January after a fall from a Toronto condominium.
Kilner had officially taken over as CEO only weeks before, while pregnant with her daughter, and has been focused on restoring stability ever since. “Still,” she says, “we got through it because Brandon had built a sense of loyalty and family, and we all believed in what he wanted to do.”
Petite and blonde, Kilner breaks into a smile when speaking of Truaxe, whom she repeatedly calls a “genius” and her “best friend.” She credits his vision for Deciem’s quick growth—investment from Estée Lauder in 2017; the accrual of $300 million in revenue; the creation of almost 900 jobs worldwide. It was Truaxe’s contagious enthusiasm and novel idea to buck the outsourcing approach to beauty entrepreneurship and bring everything, from formulation to packaging, under one roof that compelled her to leave her job as a buyer for the British health-and-beauty chain Boots and join him when Deciem was just five people working in a small factory on Toronto’s Queen Street West. Kilner hopes to continue that self-sustaining model under her tenure, with special emphasis on Deciem’s employees, whom she sees as individual entrepreneurs. “I very much believe that you have to create the right environment to inspire people to do their best,” she says, describing a corporate culture that encourages a free exchange of ideas, and a nimbleness that allows Deciem to innovate quickly. Through the end of the year and into the beginning of 2020, the company will launch 32 new products, including an SPF and concealer from The Ordinary, a new Copper Amino Isolate Lipid from NIOD’s core regimen collection, as well as two new categories: Hippooh brings a minimal-ingredient mind- set to the ever-growing baby skin-care market, while a full bath-and-body collection called Loopha features unconventional scents. (One of its offerings is best described as smelling pleasantly chalky.) There is also talk about reviving Avestan, an unrealized fragrance brand Truaxe—who was something of a perfume enthusiast—had big ambitions for, including a stand-alone store in London. “I’m not sure it’s going to be profitable,” Kilner says of the maiden olfactory voyage from a team of internal and external collaborators. “But it’s the right thing to do for Brandon.”
The Avestan store would be Deciem’s sixth retail venture in the British capital, a real estate portfolio that includes a bustling Covent Garden location, which I recently visited during the summer’s heat wave. As industrial fans cooled the space, customers stood shoulder to shoulder, sampling the cultish Glow Radiance Booster, a tone-evening serum that imparts a slight tan, from its Hylamide brand, and a rainbow of dietary supplements from Fountain, a range of liquid tinctures. I could feel a palpable warmth, not so much from the soaring temperatures outside as from a wholesomeness that Deciem seems to bring to the high-stakes beauty industry, grounded in a honest, clear direction it shares with its loyalists.
That relationship will be put to the test when the Toronto flagship opens inside the new HQ this spring. Among its more noteworthy architectural details: a pane of glass that separates shoppers from the on-site production facility, a symbol of transparency in its purest form.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
