Kilner has been with Deciem, the mother company of The Ordinary as well as NIOD and Avestan, since the start, in 2013. She and her team launched The Ordinary at the end of 2016, as the 11th brand, before Deciem was acquired by Estee Lauder in a €2.040 billion deal little over three years ago.
You’ve experienced this huge success first-hand. What have been the keys behind it?
— Taking inspiration from outside of beauty, she says. Brandon (Truaxe, co-founder of the brand, who passed away in 2019) always used to say that we don’t have the money that the big companies do. So, we need to be the rabbit whilst they’re the elephant, so that we can get into the holes which they can’t. Thinking of ’ignoring’ the beauty industry, we took our inspiration from healthcare.
— We have respect for medicine. We have respect for paracetamol, aspirin, and ingredients that have been around for a long time, so we’ll not reinvent something that just works. In the world of skincare, we can sometimes obsess about newness and think that new always means better. But if you have a headache and walk into a pharmacy, would you trust a brand new ingredient that’s just been around for three years and is going to cost you ten times more? Or would you get aspirin because aspirin will work to get rid of your headache? It’s safe. It’s effective. It’s affordable. And it’s had all these studies done all over the world.
What the team respected in pharmacy, Kilner continues, was also what it felt was missing in skincare. However, they never predicted The Ordinary would become what it did become.
— We had ten other brands at the time. For us, it was just a new approach that was particularly speaking to people who had an interest in science, a respect for ingredients, and pricing transparency. When we first developed the concept and presented it to retailers, they said no to listing it because they thought consumers wouldn’t understand it. ’It’s too complicated. White boxes will get dirty. You can’t have white on shelves in a store,’ they said, but we were sticking with our guts that it was the right thing to do. I think that is what led to success, Kilner shares. She continues:
— This was also the time when the power of content was transferred to people. If I think about how my mother used to shop skincare, she would walk into a department store and the first person that got her attention on a counter would probably get her to buy something. Or, she’d open a magazine and see a big advert with a Hollywood actress, whereas obviously, when we launched in 2016, social media content was becoming much more readily accessible.
— Before The Ordinary, it was probably much harder to talk about skincare because there’s only so much you could say when using very generic marketing terms such as ’miracle serum’ or ’ageing serum’. Or, you could put a picture of the product and just describe your experience, but you couldn’t talk about the science and understand that yes, niacinamide works for me, retinol didn’t work for me, or my skin works really well with Vitamin C. Then, people suddenly had the tools to talk about skincare — and we were giving them the information and the accessibility to skincare. We’ve always put science at the front of everything. There’s a place for everyone in beauty but we’re in functional beauty, which is ultimately science.
Can you take us through the main challenges and lessons learned from this decade?
— One of the strengths is also one of the challenges; we pretty much did and do everything in-house, from manufacturing, formulations, design, and even PR at the time, so that we could test things much quicker. The first manufacturing plant that we had in Toronto was tiny, but if we needed to run it 24 hours a day or change production, we could.
— But I also think it created a challenge. For us, supply chain was definitely one of the biggest challenges we faced. The Ordinary is such a high volume line because of the price point and suddenly, we could see how many units we had to produce. If we had used outsourcing, it would probably have been easier to ask, ’Please produce X amount of this.’ But we were so passionate about doing it ourselves that it meant we had to focus on our factories quickly, get new machinery, and such. There was a lot of learning! In the first two years, pretty much all that was discussed was our out-of-stock challenges. It always created the hype too because you couldn’t get the products — we never had a stock and if we had, it would sell out soon and we couldn’t create more. From a business perspective, that was definitely one big challenge.
— Then, we also had the loss of our founder, which was a hugely challenging time. It was awful just watching someone we all loved suffer from mental health and to see it being so public. We all felt very helpless. This was in 2018 — the same time that the business was exploding in sales — so we had to get through that and keep things going whilst also suffering a big family loss.
— Now, we still produce around 80% of our products in our main facility in Toronto but we have a secondary plant in the US and a couple of third-party manufacturers. It’s also risk mitigation — if our main facility catches fire, there’s going to be no products. The larger we get, the more responsible we have to behave.
If we take a bigger perspective, what are you curious about in 2024 and 2025?
— From a consumer perspective, what we’re seeing particularly in the Western world is that consumers are becoming so disillusioned by politicians. Instead, they’re starting to look more at companies for social impact, their stance, their voice, and their values, which is something we’ve always felt is strong for us. Indie brands have their voices while it can get slightly more complex when you join a family organisation (Estee Lauder).
— In the year of 2024, over half of the world’s population is facing elections, so I think we’re going to continue to see demands that consumers want more than products. They want to know they’re buying from a business that has values and ethics and is supporting the same causes that they’re supporting.
With your own social channels, you also have a huge influence.
— Yes. Two things with TikTok; The first, again, is the power. If you go back a few years, a lot of beauty brands planned their own campaigns of what’s going to be the big sellers that year. For us, whilst we will make our plans in terms of new products, we always have to have this buffer because the consumers decide which products to go viral. If someone starts to use glycolic on the scalp, suddenly everyone’s using glycolic on the scalp. We then have to study the safety. Can we support that claim? Is it dangerous, or are they on to something? What I’m saying is that we have to be very reactive, because I think we’re very much a community brand.
— Also, in the US, we now have TikTok Shop and it’s interesting in terms of ’social selling’ and social platforms. It’s obviously already a big thing in China and we’re now seeing it come more into other markets. It’s part of a changing of the retail landscape. Amazon is now a huge player in beauty, it’s just forever evolving, as well as consumers’ purchasing behaviours, how they’re buying stuff…
How has TikTok Shop influenced you, when it now has also become a retail channel? How have you adopted?
— In the UK, you’ve had TV shopping channels for many years which have a certain perception, says Kilner. TikTok Shop is almost like the modern-day version and a new approach to this live selling. What I do love about it is that, ultimately, our team is on there talking about our products and consumers can ask questions. For a brand like us, who love talking about science, sharing all the information we have, having difficult questions on science and diving into those topics, it gives us something that is much more difficult to get in bricks-and-mortar through a third party. In our own stores, we have those relationships, but of course, for most of our distribution, we have partners and don’t have our own people in-store.
— We had an example when our AHA peeling solution went viral on TikTok and was used by a lot of people in their late teens. This is not a product for a young skin but much more suited to something more mature, in their late thirties. That was a moment that we had to tackle — we felt a responsibility that youth skin shouldn’t be using such a strong acid. So we put money into an ’anti sales’ campaign to pay influencers to talk about how this isn’t for the teen skin. We felt that it was a responsibility to say, ’Please give this to your parent or take it off your child if they’re using it’. We don’t want people over-exfoliating their skin!