You might not remember exactly when it happened, but sometime in 2016, suddenly, The Ordinary was everywhere. The Toronto-based brand, immediately recognizable for its no-frills packaging, extremely low prices and unconventional marketing strategy, turned the skincare industry on its head at a time when transparency was a rarity. But a couple years later in 2018, the brand started making headlines for a different reason: their founder, Brandon Truaxe, started posting erratically on the company’s Instagram, from publicly firing employees to cruelly responding to commenters. More confusing drama ensued, ending in Truaxe being ousted as CEO by an Ontario Superior Court judge. Months later, in early 2019, Truaxe tragically passed away.
But those are just the headlines. Six years later, the casual outsider likely doesn’t even remember Truaxe’s name, only the vague narrative beats that formed The Ordinary’s rise, fall and rise again. A group of his friends, and employees, wanted to change that.
The result was The Abnormal Beauty Company, a new Crave documentary chronicling parent company Deciem and The Ordinary’s evolution and the real story of the man behind it. Of course, it’s been years since this story began, and the brand seemingly has emerged relatively unscathed. So why now?
“The public narrative around him froze at a singular, tragic moment — one that flattened the complexity of who he was and what he built,” Dakota Kate Isaacs, senior director of global news ventures at Deciem and the executive producer of the documentary, says. “Those of us who were inside the company knew the story was incomplete. This . . . was about reclaiming a narrative that had been reduced to headlines and restoring the dimension of a very human story.”
The documentary is unique in that the company it follows was also involved in the creation of the film itself: it’s directed by Aref Mahabadi, a founding member of Deciem and executive produced by Isaacs. In a few scenes when Mahabadi sits down with a group of former and current Deciem employees, the conversation is much more of that between friends rather than between director and interviewee. With a different subject, or a different story, this overlap might come across as disingenuous, corporate and sanitized. But here, it lent a much-needed softness to the film. Truaxe’s story is devastating, and in less careful hands, The Abnormal Beauty Company could have become a gossip tale, rehashing the most dramatic moments of his life.
Instead, viewers learn the full story of who Truaxe was, through the eyes of his friends and family. The documentary paints a compassionate portrait of a man who was a true skincare genius, endlessly outgoing and friendly. He built a true “family” out of the workplace; the entire staff and Truaxe would often go on social outings together, choosing to spend time with each other outside of work hours. His true friendship with co-founder Nicola Kilner is clear in the clips of the pair from the early Deciem days — they appear almost joined at the hip, Kilner the calm and measured counterbalance to Truaxe’s effervescent energy.
It also sheds some light on his final few months.
“Brandon was brilliant, generous, difficult, kind, magnetic and human. To this day I’ve never met anyone like him, he was truly a genius,” Isaacs says. “To reduce his complexities would have been dishonest, and to shrink his story to his final year would have been missing the point.”
His friends and past co-workers, dad and sister, Kilner and his former partner all candidly share their perception of Truaxe’s breakdown on Instagram, and the fallout that followed. Isaacs says that while some people the documentary team asked to interview said no, finding reliving the memories of the person they loved too painful, a few changed their minds over time.
“Many people chose to participate not because it was easy, but because they felt it mattered. They wanted Brandon remembered as a full, complex human being and not reduced to a headline or a final moment,” she says.
His struggle with mental illness is briefly touched on, and treated with compassion — and Isaacs says that was an important part of the filmmaking process. “We tend to flatten people when they struggle, either into tragedy or into cautionary tale,” she says. “The reality is much more complicated. Many high-functioning, high-achieving people are privately battling things most of us cannot see.”
The Abnormal Beauty Company is currently streaming on Crave, Prime Video and Apple TV.
