The Ordinary Founder Has Gone Rogue On The Brand’s Instagram Feed

Well-known brands letting loose on social media and letting the veil of professionalism slip in the name of corporate transparency has always been a tricky game to play. Companies tend to get hit pretty hard, or in this case find their products being set on fire on Snapchat.

Yes, people are pretty concerned about Deciem's founder Brandon Truaxe’s Instagram take-over is going to pan out for the everyone’s favourite affordable beauty brand and The Ordinary products.

How did we get here? Well, at the end of January, Brandon took the responsibility of posting to the official Deciem Instagramfeed into his own hands and has since gone on to denounce his title as CEO (he is now only to be referred to as ‘Worker’), ordered the redirection of company strategy via Instagram caption and regrammed a picture from his personal account of himself greeting an unspecified deer-like animal.

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Much of the feed seems to be used right now to relay some of Brandon’s personal opinions, especially if you take the time to scroll through some of his responses to comments. Some of have been particularly controversial. A woman of colour commented on one of his posts from Deciem account asking ‘Brandon, are you okay?’, to which he replied with ‘Yes but you don’t seem so well. Please use Modulating Glucosides when it’s out. Goodbye’.

Needless to say, that wasn’t cool. Nor was it necessary to bash a follower's skin. But what caused particular outrage was that the product he referred her to was understood to be a skin bleaching serum – Affinity magazine reported it as it being proven to inhibit the production of melanin although Deciem has confirmed that ascorbyl glucoside, the lightening product that it was thought to contain, isn’t going to be in it.

A Deciem spokesperson told The Debrief: 'Modulating Glucosides will not contain ascorbyl glucoside. No ingredient information has been released for this product so it’s unclear where this confusion has come from'.

Brandon addressed the issue via the Deciem Instagram page (in the aforementioned unspecified deer picture) and said: ‘Here is the reason everything is OK. Please don’t worry. I’m peaceful and will do all that needs to be done to make DECIEM stronger. Side note: NIOD’s upcoming Modulating Glucosides calms things down and does not “bleach” the skin’.

He added: ‘I’m sorry that I may have caused confusion about its function which I have descriped in more detail in a video with the lovely @nadinbaggott [beauty journalist and presenter]. MG has been delayed because of all the unjust distraction here that's not letting me focus on anything well’.

Yes, it is pretty ironic that the CEO of one of the fastest growing and wildly popular beauty brands is finding his seemingly uninvited acquisition of the company’s social media feed as time consuming. And it must be a bit of a shame that said distraction is getting in the way of new product releases. But hey, everything is okay, apparently.

It all started on 24 January when Brandon shared a video of himself on the Deciem Instagram account announcing that he was cancelling all of the company’s marketing plans after having ‘realised what we all know: marketing is simply a way to try and convince people to buy what they don’t want or don’t need’. It’s then that he announced that he would hence forth be communicating personally with the brands followers from the social media account.

A few days later he posted a cartoon of what seems to be a jungle scene of animals working together. He used this one to try and squash beef with Drunk Elephant Skincare who he had made a dig at in one of his product descriptions last year by implying that people would have to be ‘drunk’ to buy the same thing (which Drunk Elephant sell) for more.

Not long after their Instagram was almost hacked (for reasons that I’m sure elude us all…). Soon after he announced in another front facing camera video that one of their sister brands, Stemm, wasn’t working because it was too expensive and that it was to be discontinued. Then he asked Mira (we don’t know who Mira is either but this is now the means by which Deciem communicates with staff too) to put all remaining stock on sale at 70% off.

Next came the denouncement of the CEO title and request for people to be his friends rather than employees, lots of pictures of waste plastic floating around rivers and littered in fields with a promise to stop using plastic in products (in the caption he asked Alessandro and Hajar to let the suppliers know) and a brief interlude from the infamous Mira and colleague to announce that Brandon would be in NYC soon, too.

So, what's the sketch? We have no idea. Some people are into Brandon's self promotion to face and voice of Deciem, some people are a bit unsettled by it. But by the looks of things this is a path that he and the team seem pretty committed to. We're watching this space to see if any other brands follow suit with the theme of slightly manic unconventional means of getting customers on board.

**Follow Jazmin on Instagram **@JazKopotsha

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.