NOT SO ORDINARY

Nicola Kilner on her journey of scaling the business for the most sought-after skincare brand in the world

- PRATIKSHA ACHARYA

Each year brings with it yet another beauty product that becomes all the rage, but very few can compare to the popularity achieved by The Ordinary when it first hit shelves in 2016. The breakout star of 2017, The Ordinary by DECIEM was the precursor of the usage of active compounds for skincare, with no frills attached. The brand’s journey since then has been nothing short of sensational. CEO and co-founder of parent company DECIEM, Nicola Kilner has had front-row seats to the entire show, and has often steered the ship away from controversies to their one goal: Making skincare accessible to all. Now launching their haircare range, Kilner talks about the highs and lows of the journey.

The Ordinary’s inception was anything but ordinary. “We launched The Ordinary to prove a point and for it to bring the pharmacy angle of beauty into play. Buying medicines is easy, and you roughly know the price point of the medicine, but the same can’t be said about beauty. So when we first proposed the idea of The Ordinary to one of the biggest retailers in North America and the UK, they said that consumers won’t understand it, and that the packaging wouldn’t work,” says Kilner. But Kilner and the late Brandon Truaxe (cofounder of DECIEM) chose to go with their gut, and birthed a worldwide phenomenon with The Ordinary, which, Kilner says, they never really expected.