Deciem to shut its entire business

Deciem Founder Brandon Truaxe announced on Instagram that the company will be shutting down its entire business. Following Truaxe’s rant on Instagram, the company’s website has been shut. However, The Ordinary products can be found on https://deciem.com/brand/the-ordinary

Founded in 2013 by Brandon Truaxe and Nicola Kilner, Toronto-based Deciem is the wildly successful beauty company behind hyped beauty products like The Ordinary, NIOD, and Hylamide. Estée Lauder acquired minority stake in Deciem in 2017. The company reportedly brought in $300 million in sales. It has stores in UK, US, and Canada.

Truaxe has been making headline since the beginning of the year due to his erratic behaviour. Deciem Co-CEO Nicola Kilner was abruptly fired from the company in February, only to be hired back after six months. “I still don’t fully understand what happened,” Kilner told Elle in April 2018. Things began to spiral downwards when Truaxe took over the company’s Instagram in January in the name of transparency. First, there was Drunk Elephant incident where the caption of The Ordinary’s Marual oil read, “one would have to be drunk to overpay for Marula.” Truaxe later issued an apology to Drunk Elephant and pledged to donate $25,000 to Save The Elephant.

In an attempt to be a better leader, Truaxe stripped off ‘CEO’ title and called himself ‘worker’ in February. He also posted images of literal garbage and cut ties with his packaging supplier, Peter of Mong Packaging, via Instagram post. Truaxe promised better offer to Peter while ‘Alan of Idealpak’ was promised more business. Perhaps cutting ties and making business deals are better to be addressed personally via meetings or e-mail instead of blasting internal politics to customers.

The weird Instragram posts continued. Truaxed embroiled in Instagram comment fight with followers. He commented, "Yes but you don't seem so well. Please use Modulating Glucosides when it's out. Goodbye." This led to Deciem products burning. The saga got even more out of control when Truaxe fired entire US team when the company was rapidly expanding to US. At one point, Truaxe was using Deciem account to call for help. Before his announcement of shutting down Deciem entire business on 8 October, Truaxe sent out series of e-mails - obtained by Racked - to his employees, attorneys, Leonard Lauder, and Estée Lauder executives in April that he is done with Deciem.