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Skincare for less? HOW EXTRAORDINARY!
His high-tech, accessibly priced products have earned thousands of devotees and shaken up the beauty industry. Meet gamechanger BRANDON TRUAXE
ITwouldn’t surprise me if there were little voodoo dolls of Brandon Truaxe on the desks of cosmetics bosses all over the world, because this is the man responsible for probably the biggest revolution the beauty industry has ever seen. He has dared to launch high-tech, age- defying skincare products that cost a tenth (or even less) of their rivals with skincare line The Ordinary. (Ironically named, because it’s anything but.) The brand sells at low prices because it doesn’t spend on fancy packaging, expensive marketing or supermodel ‘faces’ – yet still makes a tidy profit. The waiting list for Brandon’s products puts the queues at Harvey Nichols for Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty in the shade – more than 75,000 signed up for the launch of The Ordinary foundations on the Victoria Health website. After all, who can argue with less than £6 for a fabulous face base?
In just four years, Brandon has built a beauty empire (with more than ten brands under the umbrella company Deciem) that not only took more than £335 million in orders in the last quarter, but so intrigued Leonard Lauder, patriarch of the Estée Lauder empire, that the company took a small stake in Deciem. Alongside The Ordinary are NIOD, HIF, the liquid skincare supplement range Fountain, grooming line AB Crew and bodycare line The Chemistry Brand, with approaching 200 products altogether in the portfolio.
Today, this 39-year- old beauty revolutionary is in town on a flying visit. Just after we meet, he will go on to collect the most innovative beauty brand award at Luxury Briefing’s prestigious ceremony before heading back to Toronto, Canada, where this British-born, part- Greek, part-Iranian dynamo is based. ‘These days, I live on an aeroplane,’ he says.
It’s all completely – yes – extraordinary, for someone who trained as a computer scientist and whose grooming regime was once limited to a bar of soap. ‘I was an archetypal geek in a plaid shirt, glued to a computer screen,’ he smiles. ‘And if you had told me then that one day I would have a beauty business, I would have looked at you as if you were on some kind of mind-bending drug.’
But while doing analysis for a major cosmetics company looking at formula costings, Brandon had his lightbulb moment. ‘One of the products launched for around $1,000 cost them less than $2.17 to make.’ So, having made a cool £590,000 selling a (much less sexy) software business that simplified car-leasing agreements, Brandon moved into skincare, building and selling other beauty companies before launching Deciem. It was a non-compete clause restricting him from launching a skincare product costing more than £22 that inspired him to launch products costing far less, setting Brandon on the path to being the ‘beauty disruptor’ he has become.
As Brandon puts it, ‘What I’m about is honesty, integrity and transparency. If you want to spend £500 on a great skin cream, fine. But the point is, there’s no need. If you’re selling someone a beautiful dream, tell them it’s a dream. Don’t turn something that’s entirely functional into a dream.’
More than that, though, The Ordinary cleverly taps into the shift towards personalisation, enabling us to become our own skincare expert and react to what we’re seeing in the mirror on any given day: a dose of skin-plumping Hyaluronic Acid 2% + B5 here; a drop of brightening Lactic Acid 5% + HA 2% there; add a squeeze of hydrating Natural Moisturizing Factors/HA; maybe a puffiness-blitzing burst of Caffeine Solution 5% + EGCG on that morning when you wake up with more under-eye baggage than usual. By offering precise, individual ingredients that you use to ‘build’ your skincare regime, explains Brandon, ‘you’re more likely to be able to figure out what works for your skin and what doesn’t’. Vogue has called it a ‘skintellectual’ approach to beauty, while Cosmopolitan observes: ‘It’s skincare that puts you in charge.’
When The Ordinary launched in 2016 – via a modest couple of paragraphs in Victoria Health founder Gill Sinclair’s September newsletter to its customers – both Brandon and Gill held their breath. Gill remembers: ‘We honestly didn’t