An entrepreneur behind a billion dollar beauty empire has revealed how her co-founder’s drug addiction nearly led to the downfall of her businesses.
Nicola Kilner, CEO of The Ordinary and DECIEM, was a business-management student at Nottingham Trent University. She detailed the highs and lows of her career on Steven Bartlett's podcast The Diary Of A CEO (DOAC).
As reported by Wales Online, she became one of Boots’ youngest buyers after a sponsored work programme she completed there during her university studies. A year after finishing her degree, she met Brandon Truaxe, an Iranian-Canadian cosmetic computer scientist.
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After years of success, Truaxe began to display strange behaviour which caused major problems for both the brand and Nicola around 2017. Speaking on the DOAC podcast, she said: "This is really where Brandon's behaviour started to change, it truly happened what felt like overnight so at the the end of 2017."
"We spent so much time together, like we didn't do drugs, he was just high on energy and happy...he's just drinking diet coke and eating fries with ketchup type person. Towards the end of 2017, he'd become intrigued I think by magic mushrooms and just kind of this idea of you know can you access different parts of your brain."
Brandon quickly became a different person according to Nicola, with the co-founder saying he had a "coldness" in his eyes and was increasingly erratic. According to an interview with the Financial Post, Truaxe also took crystal meth in Britain, leading to an arrest and treatment.
There were strange Instagram posts from the corporate account, the sudden termination of key partnerships with the likes of Sephora and instant firings in emails sent by Truaxe. The business appeared to be in freefall and even Nicola was sacked by Truaxe.
However, with investors scared, legal action was launched to remove him as co-chief executive. In October 2018, an Ontario judge sided with beauty giant Estée Lauder, then a minority investor in DECIEM, to strip Brandon Truaxe of his role as CEO, leaving Nicola as sole CEO.
Truaxe's downfall took less than 12 months, with Nicola telling DOAC that before October 2017, her business partner barely drank alcohol, let alone did drugs. Just a few months after being removed as CEO, Truaxe died as a result of a fall from his Toronto apartment. Talking to DOAC, Nicola revealed she was only told that he had died through a media inquiry.
Now, DECIEM and The Ordinary are thriving and Nicola is still CEO. Estée Lauder bought a majority stake in DECIEM in 2021 for $1billion and the brand continues to grow.
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