Estée Lauder buys Deciem, owner of The Ordinary skincare

Estee Lauder Cos. (one of the biggest animal testers in skincare & cosmetics) agreed to pay to boost its stake in Deciem Inc – the Owner of The Ordinary, as the deal is expected to close in the quarter ending June 30.

 Lauder family members, subject to a Stockholder’s Agreement, control approximately 86% of the company’s voting power largely through ownership of higher voting Class B shares. Estee Lauder agreed to buy the rest of Deciem after three years.

That would put Deciem /The Ordinary among 10 largest brands owned by Estee Lauder including Aveda, MAC, Tom Ford, Jo Malone, Bobbi Brown, Too Faced, Dr. Jart+  and Becca (which has gone out of business as of February 2021) Beauty’s biggest conglomerates – Procter & Gamble, Estée Lauder, L’Oréal, Unilever, Shiseido and Avon — all sell in China and continue to test on animals.

Estee Lauder and The Ordinary couldn’t be more different in mission, product pricing or animal testing.

DECIEM does not test on animals and does not pay others to do so. None of their brands are sold in mainland China since such sales require animal testing for registration purposes. Let’s hope this remains the case under Estee Lauder.

Estee Lauder brand delivered solid double-digit growth on the back of growth in travel retail and Mainland China. Selling in China matters.

The Ordinary is a brand from DECIEM. They are a family of brands focused on advanced functional beauty. The Deciem team is specialized in materials chemistry and biochemistry, and they have brought pioneering innovation in skincare through their central brands, Hylamide and NIOD.

The brand was created by Brandon Truaxe to celebrate integrity in its most humble and true form. Its offering is pioneering, not in the familiar technologies it uses, but in its honesty and integrity. The Ordinary is born to disallow commodity to be disguised as ingenuity. The Ordinary is “Clinical formulations with integrity”.

One of Brandon Truaxe’s founding principals is that the Ordinary wasn’t going to give customers fancy packaging & useless fillers on the inside and charge a small fortune for it or test on animals.

Here’s a quote from Brandon’s letter when Deciem initially formed a partnership with Estee Lauder in 2017: “While I do sincerely believe that ELC has embraced everything about us, the facts are nonetheless very clear: they have a minority shareholding position; they do not control our decisions or dictate our direction; and I continue to remain CEO (and there is documentation in place to make it nearly impossible to fire me). We will not change. We continue not to test on animals. We will not change our formulations (unless we are making them better like we just did with NIOD’s MMHC2–  topical hyaluronic supplementation by combining 15 forms of hyaluronic compounds, hyaluronic precursors and a hyaluronic support technology in a peptide-charged delivery system); we will not increase prices of products we sell to you; we will not change our mindset, our beliefs or anything that you have come to love about us.” God rest his soul. May this forever be.

The Ordinary has operated with integrity and bring to market effective, more familiar technologies at honorable prices. In the category of functional beauty, integrity is rare. Commonplace technologies are referred to as groundbreaking and insensible pricing strategies confuse the audience, disguising commodity technologies as advanced.

Additional Information about DECIEM:
All DECIEM products, across all brands including The Ordinary, are free of parabens, sulphates, mineral oil, methylchloroisothiazolinone, methylisothiazolinone, animal oils, coal tar dyes, formaldehyde, mercury, oxybenzone.

Sources: Bloomberg, Financial times, Deciem.