The Ordinary and the Six-Dollar Serum

A 30-millilitre bottle of The Ordinary's Niacinamide 10% + Zinc 1% currently costs US$6 on the brand's American website. Its name reads like a line from a formulation sheet. The two ingredients the company wants customers to notice appear beside their concentrations; the claims about oil, tone and texture are secondary.

The bottle is also a compact expression of Brandon Truaxe's argument with the beauty industry. He believed skincare companies hid familiar ingredients behind proprietary names, stories and prices that bore little relation to the contents. His answer was to manufacture products himself, state more plainly what was in them and sell them for sums that made prestige markups look difficult to defend.

Truaxe devised the structure that let DECIEM move quickly, wrote much of its public voice and kept final authority over product and creative decisions. That concentration of control placed him at the centre of the 2018 crisis that nearly closed the company. Three months after an Ontario court removed him as a director, officer and employee, he died at 40.

The business went on to become far larger. Estée Lauder completed its acquisition of DECIEM in 2024 after investing approximately US$1.7 billion in three stages. The Ordinary now sits in the conglomerate's group of brands with annual net sales between US$500 million and US$1 billion. Yet the low-priced bottle still carries Truaxe's ideas about price, information and control. The company's history since his death has been an attempt to retain those ideas while shedding its dependence on one person.

A computer scientist studies the markup

Truaxe was born in Tehran in 1978 and raised in Canada. He studied computer science at the University of Waterloo, an education that would later shape more than DECIEM's internal software. He approached beauty as a system that could be examined, reorganised and made to run faster. Contemporary accounts of his life consistently trace that route from computing into cosmetics.

His interest began during a 1999 internship at a cosmetics laboratory in New York. He was reviewing formulas for regulatory and compliance problems when a newly launched US$1,000 cream caught his attention. In a 2017 interview with the Evening Standard, Truaxe put its manufacturing cost below US$2.17. "I didn't understand how that could possibly be," he said. The discrepancy angered him and fixed his attention on the gap between the cost of a formula and the price built around it.

He spent the following years moving between technology and beauty ventures, experiencing what he described as both success and failure. In 2011 he met Nicola Kilner, then a beauty buyer at Boots in the United Kingdom. Kilner has recalled being captivated by his speed, memory and energy. She also understood retail and operations, skills that would become essential as his ideas grew into a company.

Truaxe founded DECIEM in Toronto in 2013 with Kilner and his longtime business partner Pasquale Cusano. The name came from decima, the Latin word associated with ten. Advisers had told the founders that they could not build ten things at once, so they set out to do exactly that.

DECIEM's brands shared a laboratory, factory, design team, distribution network and software system. No single small brand had to finance that capacity alone. Truaxe kept formulation, manufacturing, design, marketing and operational software inside the company, compressing product development and decision-making. DECIEM's founder page describes this shared infrastructure as a founding principle.

By April 2016, DECIEM had launched ten brands and more than 100 products. It employed about 80 people and had shipped 2.5 million units to 12,000 stores. Truaxe told WIRED that the fastest products moved from idea to market in about four months, although twelve months was more typical. The company handled its laboratory work, manufacturing, marketing and software itself.

The arrangement gave Truaxe the speed he wanted. It also concentrated knowledge and authority around him. He was the product architect, the final creative decision-maker, a public spokesman and one of the people who understood the company's technical systems most deeply. For several years, those roles looked like a competitive advantage.

The eleventh brand becomes the hit

The Ordinary arrived in September 2016 as DECIEM's eleventh brand. The apparent contradiction suited a company that called itself "the Abnormal Beauty Company."

Its first online range contained 27 products, according to The New Yorker. There were acids, oils, hydrators, antioxidants, retinoids, peptides and vitamin C derivatives, often offered in several forms or concentrations. This was a catalogue of components rather than a conventional launch organised around one hero cream.

The presentation made the products look almost self-explanatory. Names such as Lactic Acid 10% + HA and Retinol 1% in Squalane moved selected ingredients from the back of the package to the largest type on the front. Clear dropper bottles, clinical typography and short product descriptions supported the impression that the company had stripped away the usual salesmanship.

By late 2017, most of the range cost less than US$10. A caffeine solution was US$6.70, rose-hip oil was US$9.80 and a retinoid was US$13.90. When DECIEM launched two foundations in April that year at US$6.70 and US$6.90, their waiting list reached about 75,000 people. Allure reported that DECIEM was struggling to make products fast enough. When Sephora put The Ordinary on its American website in December, the line sold out within a week.

Niacinamide, hyaluronic acid and retinol were established ingredients, many of them inexpensive by prestige-skincare standards. DECIEM had already paid for laboratories, manufacturing equipment, technical staff, warehouses and ecommerce systems, so The Ordinary could use that capacity without financing it from scratch.

Truaxe supplied a rare cost breakdown in a 2016 Q&A with Caroline Hirons. He said high-purity niacinamide cost less than US$10 a kilogram and that the raw materials in Niacinamide 10% + Zinc 1% totalled less than US$1 per bottle. Compounding, inbound and outbound testing, and retail accounted for most of the remaining cost. He also said The Ordinary used DECIEM's standard percentage margin and that its average margin was higher than the margin on NIOD's Flavanone Mud. The six-dollar serum was a profitable product made from cheap inputs inside an existing factory network.

Kilner put the strategy in retail terms: Truaxe wanted to respect customers' intelligence by naming ingredients directly and pricing products close to wholesale. On a shelf, the comparison was hard to miss. A familiar active below US$10 sat beside serums priced ten times higher.

On the front label, the active doubled as the product name. Beside a price below US$10, it invited comparison with prestige serums. Percentages and clinical typography became The Ordinary's branding even as the company rejected conventional beauty copy.

The catalogue needed explaining

Buying several Ordinary products required decisions that the front labels did not answer: order, time of day, frequency and conflicts. In September 2017, aesthetician Nia Patten published an 18-part FAQ on how to use the range. She moderated the Deciem Chatroom Facebook group, where beginners asked how to start and other members posted technical questions about combining products every day. Some members wrote out their regimens, printed spreadsheets or marked the bottles to remember the order. Patten's guide repeated DECIEM's advice to use no more than three serums at once.

DECIEM and Sephora also published regimen instructions. A Sephora guide dated December 2017 arranged 17 Ordinary products by format, position in a routine, conflicts and time of use. It placed water-based formulas before oils and creams, recommended evening use for several acid and vitamin C formulas and listed niacinamide and vitamin C as a conflict.

In January 2018, The New Yorker reported that the Skincare Addiction forum contained hundreds of thousands of posts about "TO", many devoted to the order and amount of each ingredient. In DECIEM's New York store, customers filled baskets with vials. Writer Rachel Syme had eight Ordinary products in regular rotation and said her skincare spending had fallen by half.

The founder becomes the public channel

The Ordinary's success enlarged Truaxe's audience. Estée Lauder bought a minority stake in DECIEM in June 2017, giving the company capital and international support while Truaxe retained an unusually direct relationship with customers.

Truaxe treated DECIEM's email list and social accounts as extensions of his own voice. He wrote with emoji, terms of affection, digressions and emphatic declarations. He answered customer questions, demonstrated products and spoke in the first person through corporate accounts. Customers encountered the founder without the usual public-relations filter, an intimacy that suited a brand selling disclosure.

During late 2017 and 2018, the same channels began carrying confrontations, abrupt announcements and accusations. Truaxe argued with commenters, disclosed internal disputes and announced changes affecting employees and business partners. He fired Kilner in early 2018 after she challenged his treatment of a collaborator. She returned that summer when he asked her to come back, finding a company whose staff and directors were increasingly alarmed. Kilner's 2019 account to ELLE describes both their close friendship and the difficulty of trying to keep DECIEM operating around unpredictable decisions.

By May 2018, the crisis had moved beyond social-media embarrassment. The Ontario court record says UK authorities took Truaxe to a London psychiatric hospital, where he stayed for several days, and that he appears to have spent several more days in a Canadian psychiatric hospital later that month. Board members and colleagues repeatedly urged him to seek help.

The record also says Truaxe fired senior employees without board approval, disclosed confidential discussions, announced the end of business relationships through Instagram and entered material commitments without regard to DECIEM's liquidity.

DECIEM had been built to remove barriers between Truaxe's decisions and execution. By 2018, that design allowed a private crisis to become a corporate one, affecting staff, suppliers, finances and the company's public accounts.

The order to close DECIEM

On October 8, 2018, Truaxe instructed DECIEM's employees to stop working and posted a video saying that the company would shut down until further notice. He did not consult the board. Most stores stayed closed the next day, the website became a blank page and operations ceased. At the time, the company employed about 400 people and operated roughly 30 stores, alongside factories, warehouses and a substantial ecommerce business.

Estée Lauder, still a minority shareholder, asked the Ontario Superior Court for urgent relief under federal corporate law. The court's October 15 reasons drew on a detailed affidavit from Estée Lauder director Andrew Ross and recorded the shutdown, the preceding months of unauthorised decisions and the board's failed attempts to contain them.

The court removed Truaxe as a director, officer and employee and appointed Kilner sole interim chief executive. It barred him from interfering with staff, suppliers, computer systems and social accounts, directed DECIEM to resume normal operations, and appointed PricewaterhouseCoopers to examine his allegations of financial crime and the company's finances. The judge wrote that the business was on the brink of disaster and that urgent intervention was necessary. The full orders and supporting record appear in Estée Lauder Cosmetics Limited v. Deciem Beauty Group Inc..

DECIEM's unusual concentration of authority now became a practical hazard. Truaxe had helped build its software and remained integral to the systems used for email and operations. He also controlled much of its public voice. A structure designed to shorten the distance between an idea and a product left few buffers between the founder's decisions and hundreds of livelihoods.

Kilner later framed the intervention as an effort to protect DECIEM for Truaxe and show him what he stood to lose if he refused help. DECIEM reopened, while concern for him continued.

DECIEM loses its founder

On January 20, 2019, a little more than three months after the court order, Truaxe died after a fall from his Toronto condominium. He was 40. Contemporary police reporting described the related incident as non-suspicious and non-criminal; the company initially disclosed no cause.

DECIEM closed its offices, stores, warehouses and factories for a day. Kilner told staff that "heartbroken doesn't come close" to how she felt.

Truaxe's authorship remained visible everywhere. He had conceived the multi-brand structure, insisted on the laboratories and factories, shaped the products, built technical systems and established the anticorporate voice that customers recognised. He also made decisions in 2018 that destabilised those systems and hurt people around him.

Kilner had been DECIEM's operational counterpart to Truaxe's creative force from the beginning, sometimes hand-filling samples with the early team. After returning as chief executive, she rebuilt relationships with employees and retailers, added organisational support and reduced a sprawling portfolio so the company could concentrate on The Ordinary and NIOD.

Staff created memorials from Truaxe's books, donated to mental-health organisations and revived AVESTAN, the fragrance project he had begun outside DECIEM. The company still gives its founder a permanent page beside Kilner's account of their partnership. Her words there are direct: "We never expected to be in a DECIEM without Brandon."

From founder-led company to Estée Lauder brand

In 2021, Estée Lauder increased its ownership of DECIEM from about 29 per cent to 76 per cent. DECIEM had generated approximately US$460 million in net sales during the twelve months ending January 31, 2021, and the transaction gave it an implied enterprise value of US$2.2 billion. The 2021 announcement sets out those company-reported figures. Estée Lauder acquired the remaining shares in May 2024 for an estimated US$860 million, bringing its total net investment across three stages to approximately US$1.7 billion.

In its completion announcement, Estée Lauder placed The Ordinary among its brands earning between US$500 million and US$1 billion a year. It also ranked the brand among the top two in prestige skincare in Canada and the United States, and among the top four in France, Germany and the United Kingdom for the quarter ending March 2024. A brand built on US$6 serums had entered the upper tier of Estée Lauder's prestige portfolio.

Full ownership has left the original operating model largely intact. DECIEM says it still performs most research, development and supply-chain work in-house. Toronto remains home to five laboratories. In January 2026, global brand president Jesper Rasmussen told the Canadian Press that 95 per cent of the company's products were made in Canada and that production had reached about 400,000 units a day.

Kilner handed daily management to Rasmussen at the end of 2024 while retaining a co-founder role focused on structure and long-term direction, according to Vogue Business. DECIEM has also begun expanding beyond the two brands on which it concentrated after the crisis. Its current corporate site lists The Ordinary, NIOD, LOoPHA and the revived Chemistry Brand, while AVESTAN remains a project honouring Truaxe.

Today's governance is more conventional than the structure Truaxe ran. The company still organises itself around his preferences: in-house science, vertical integration, impatient product development and a suspicion of standard beauty language. Those preferences now function as institutional principles, distributed across a team.

What survives on the bottle

The Ordinary has expanded into cleansers, moisturisers, body care, scalp treatments, sunscreen and makeup. It publishes more regimen guidance and testing detail than it did at launch. The range is broader, the owner is one of the world's largest beauty groups and the production system bears little resemblance to the shortage-prone operation of 2017.

Niacinamide 10% + Zinc 1% remains US$6 in the United States. Natural Moisturizing Factors + HA is US$6.70; Glycolic Acid 7% Exfoliating Toner is US$9; Hyaluronic Acid 2% + B5 with Ceramides is US$9.90. More complex products cost more, and The Ordinary's pricing statement acknowledges the role of operational costs alongside raw materials. The familiar actives still establish a low reference price for skincare.

Ingredient names, percentages and compatibility advice now cover skincare packaging and retailer pages. Competitors adopted that vocabulary after The Ordinary proved that millions of customers would shop by active and concentration.

Concentration can be mistaken for potency, potency for efficacy and ingredient research for a trial of the finished formula. Clinical typography and chemical names can sell a product as effectively as the older language of luxury.

The Ordinary's product names begin with the contents rather than a promise about youth or radiance. A conspicuously low price sits beside them. Formulation, testing, instructions and judgement determine the rest.

DECIEM now publishes routine guides and testing details. Its laboratories and global manufacturing system are part of a company wholly owned by Estée Lauder. Truaxe's question remains on the bottle: what is this, and why does it cost what it does? The company kept the question and removed one founder's power to answer it alone.