Front Burner - Deciem and the death of Brandon Truaxe

Episode Date: January 23, 2019

Brandon Truaxe, the founder of Canadian skincare company Deciem, has died after a year-long public unravelling. He built 'The Abnormal Beauty Company' into a worldwide brand through a combination of radical pricing and social media marketing. But his increasingly erratic behaviour, documented on his company's Instagram account, ultimately cost him his position as CEO. Senior business reporter Aaron Saltzman takes us inside Truaxe's story.

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about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. Brandon Truax did something pretty amazing. He thought the beauty industry was a scam. So he created a company, turned the industry on its head, and made a ton of money in the process.

The company was called Decium. It's a Canadian success story. It's just naked, plain. So yeah, I love it. Who would want to pay, you know, $60 for a serum where you can pay $9 and get the exact same results? I think it feels honest. Yeah. Definitely. It works at a good price. Brandon Truax died over the weekend.

He was just 40 years old. And his death follows a year-long public unraveling. Much of it filmed by Brandon himself. And posted on his and the company's Instagram account. Hi everyone, I'm Brandon Truax. This is the final post of Desiem, which we will shut down all operations. So what happened to Brandon Truax? Today on FrontBurner, I'm talking to Aaron Saltzman. He's reported on Desiem and interviewed Brandon. But first, producer Shannon Higgins. Hi, Shannon.

Hey, Jamie. So Shannon is a producer on the show, and we're talking today about Deciem, this company that has really disrupted the beauty industry. Shannon, pre-Deciem, what is the landscape like? It's really crowded and very expensive. Very expensive. Yes, so skincare products can be used for everything from moisturizing to cleaning to preventing wrinkles and things like that. But basically what you need to know is that they're a high-end luxury product often,

and you need a lot of money to buy them. I know this because I am very guilty of buying serums, and they can be up to $100. Totally. I have made some dents in my bank account by buying some serums myself. And what did Deciem do that was different? Deciem basically blew up the entire model. They ditched their marketing budget, created this really simple product, and they basically made really fancy things very accessible. So accessible that products that were selling for like $80, $60, $100, retinols or serums were being sold for like six bucks.

Wow. Do we know if these products work any better than more expensive products? No idea. Like, I don't know if they're any better than anything else out there, but they have totally changed the way people, at least in Canada, are buying these products. And so it's really not surprising that this company has become this incredible Canadian success story, which makes the death of its founder, Brandon Truax, in so many ways,

all the more tragic. Shannon, thanks. Thanks, Jamie. Okay, so that's Deciem. Now to Aaron. Hi, Aaron. Hi. Thanks so much for joining us today. My pleasure. So I want to pick up this next part of the story with you.

Let's start in January of 2018. What is Brandon Truax posting on Instagram? So I think that's about the perfect place to pick up this story because looking back, we can see that that was sort of the first little sign that things were about to start to get really interesting with Decium and with Brandon in particular. Couldn't sleep well last night because I was thinking about the beautiful emotions and comments that you all shared with us. Brandon Truax decided that, announced on Instagram, that he was going to take over the company's

Instagram account. Actually, not just the Instagram account, although that was the main one, all of their social media accounts. He was not just the Instagram account, although that was the main one. All of their social media accounts. He was going to take over personally. And of course, he announced this in a video on Instagram. That was the beginning of this. I've now cancelled all of our marketing plans, all of our marketing strategies. From now on, I'm going to communicate personally with you.

And what does he say about why he wants to do that? He said that he needed to talk directly to his customers and to his followers. And he didn't feel that that was happening through the corporate account when somebody else was managing that. He didn't feel that it was being direct enough. He didn't feel it was being straightforward enough and honest enough. And he didn't want that filter between him and the people using his products. Marketing is simply a way to try to convince people to buy what they don't want or don't need. Do people think that this is a smart move at this point? I mean, it is sort of on brand with Deciem and The Ordinary. Well, that's just it. And again, that's why I mentioned

exactly. That's why I mentioned that we're looking at this in hindsight, because at the time it was exactly on brand. The entire marketing strategy or unmarketing strategy of this company was to not pay for people to talk about their products. It was to talk about them themselves and to generate that discussion amongst the people who were using them and to talk to them directly and to do it in an interactive environment. and to talk to them directly and to do it in an interactive environment. We launched a brand called STEM about a year ago. It's not working. Mira, can you please put it on sale as of tomorrow at 70% off? So that at the time did not seem extremely extraordinary.

It got more extraordinary later. So let's talk about that. We start to move now into the winter, February, March. So in February, he announced that he was no longer going to be CEO. He was just a worker, his title. He changed his brand. He changed his title on the website. He changed his title on his business cards.

That's because I've never actually been CEO, and SCM actually has never needed a CEO. Responsible people don't need CEOs. Nobody really understood what that meant. I saw a post where he talks about wanting to be a friend and not a boss. He's going to be a friend. You know, I've never liked any of my bosses in my life. So I don't want to be a boss.

I want to be a friend. People remarked on this, but nobody had any real answers and he didn't provide any explanation for it. And then he started, you could see the marketing strategy from looking back now from Brandon's perspective. He started talking about, you know, his company would not be testing on animals, but he posted a very disturbing picture of a dead sheep.

Of a dead sheep. Yes. And people kind of went, whoa, okay. He said we're going to be more environmentally responsible. And he started posting pictures of weird shots of garbage piles. I want to get a sense at this time, the winter of 2018, what position the company is in. It's a real Canadian success story in a lot of ways. Well, it was and it is a Canadian success story. And, you know, it's really hard to quantify how well this company did.

We know how fast it grew. We can say that it started with zero stores and in just a few short years, they're pushing 40 stores around the world. Their online sales are 75% of their products. They told me, personally, Brandon told me, that they had annual sales of $300 million a year. I think we can get into a billion-dollar business without having to embrace a draconian corporate culture. We have no way of verifying that. It's a privately held company, so we don't know. He made an outlandish claim when we talked about how one day soon they were going to be bigger

than Dolce & Gabbana. In a year, year and a half from now, we're going to be the size of Dolce & Gabbana. Dolce & Gabbana's sales are in the billions. So clearly they were doing extremely well. It was well-known around the world, and you don't get that well-known, and you don't have that kind of and you don't have those kinds of,

that kind of reputation and response globally without those kinds of sales. I know a lot of people talked about how Brandon Truax was brilliant in many ways. Yeah. And he was, he was brilliant. He was right on the edge with his brilliance. When you talk about what he was able to achieve with this company, I mean, this is a guy who started off as a computer science major in university. And he specialized, he told me, he specialized in numbers, in binary numbers, ones and zeros. Decium is a play on the Latin word for ten. I didn't know that. And it's a made-up word, but that's where it comes from.

He started with ten products, but it's binary. It's one and zero. And that was his sort of idea. He came from that space and he immediately saw what needed to be done in this industry and a way to get in and a way to disrupt this industry. And that was that the amount of money that was spent on marketing was all being used in part to push up the cost of these products on people. And they all do their own research, they get convinced what it is and talked about it,

then all of a sudden you're selling something that they need, that they want, that they're researching. All the barriers of sales and marketing drop. Obviously, Deciem was getting a lot of notoriety on the internet, but also these big players were noticing this company as well, because in 2017, Estee Lauder bought a third of this company. That's right. They spent a reported $50 million to buy a third, or about a 28% stake was my understanding at the time. And you can really

see why. I mean, when you think about it, if you've got another competitor that's undercutting your products by that amount and is making that much of an inroad into your business, well, you buy them. The minute you start disrupting an industry, if you're having that big an impact, then the larger players will come in and see that as a threat. And they will do their best to either marginalize that threat or actually take it over. So here we are in the winter of 2018. We've got this company, this Canadian company is doing really well. A huge player in the beauty industry buys a chunk of it.

And then things start to get a little bit odder, for lack of a better word. When did things really start to spiral a little bit for Brandon Truex? Well, I think things started to spiral in the spring. Now, there are some people who would say that things started to spiral when he fired Nicola Kilner, his CEO,

because she was his best friend. Everybody knew how close they were. That was back at the end of February. Look, the co-CEO that I fired, I left her to death, but she told me that one of the first people who joined here is telling people I'm sick. There are some mistakes that cannot be made. So there are some people who say this starts then, because that was such a strange move, and that was just out of the blue and everybody knew just the kind of relationship they had but for me it starts in the spring when the videos changed and the tenor of

the videos changed how do they change the focus changed it moved from the company and weird shots of dead sheep and piles of garbage to brandon truax himself and personal treatises of his wandering through streets and talking about different things like people are out to get me at some point in many of these videos and in other videos he appeared that he was on drugs guys you know I don't smoke I'm all kinds of drugs and everybody depends on who you ask what the different kind of drug but a variety of crime but I don't smoke okay and in another video he was veryational, and they're all out of context. There's a video where somebody is saying,

Brandon, I'm just trying to help you. Jonathan, this is abuse. You need to calm down. Jonathan? You'll end up getting killed. Please listen to me. Jonathan? Brandon, you'll end up getting killed. Brandon!

Jonathan, please tell them that I won't sue them. This is going to go on Instagram for Desiem in exactly one minute unless the car arrives very close to me with my luggage. It really changed right around that time. It really started to go off. Is it fair to say there's this tenor of paranoia around these videos? Yes, yes.

And that was sort of the first inkling of this. And what you'll see, and maybe we'll talk about this as the conversation goes on a bit, but that becomes a bit of a recurring theme. That was the first instance that I could tell where it started to come out, that idea of they're out to get me. In one, he said, they've changed my minivar. In another one, he said, there's a camera in my hotel room. They're watching me, that kind of stuff.

They keep replacing my minivar. watching me, that kind of stuff. They keep replacing my minibar. I'm worried because I'm a shaman. And that became a thread throughout many of the subsequent videos that he posted. And what we know now, and I want to get to this in a moment, but this is from a lawsuit that was filed in October that according to Estee Lauder, Brandon was hospitalized around two times in the late spring. Yeah, so Estee Lauder, in the court documents that they used to support that application for an injunction,

they said that Brandon was hospitalized on two separate occasions, once in England and once in Toronto. two separate occasions, once in England and once in Toronto. And the first time that happened was right around the same time that those videos started turning very personal. And he started getting into that stuff about people are out to get me and, you know, I'm with the CIA and that kind of stuff. That's where everything started coming to a head. You actually spoke to Brandon at this time. No one knew that he had been hospitalized. How did he seem to you in the summer?

That's really interesting because we had been asking to talk to him for weeks, verging on months, actually. asking to talk to him for weeks, verging on months actually. And we had gone through his corporate publicists and we had gone through people in New York and Toronto and London, and they kept saying, no, no, no, no, no. And then one day out of the blue, right around the end of mid June, I guess, I got a response, an email, and then a text from Brandon saying, sure, I'll do a TV interview. And I looked at my producer at the time. I just went, whoa, because he hadn't, from what I could tell, done any TV interviews, and he hasn't done any since. We were the only ones. He invited us in, and it was a really enlightening experience. The office, the headquarters is in eastern downtown Toronto.

It's a small, low-slung building, and it's all in one sort of area. You walk in, and there's the corporate side, a group of sort of workers at computers designing things. And then off the back of that, there's a very small lab area. And then off the back of that, there's a distribution area where they send the product out. We walked in, and he went, hey, how's it going? He invited us in. He was voluble. He was gregarious.

He was outgoing. He was dynamic. He immediately offered us a tour, started wandering around, started showing he was very proud of his setup, and justifiably so. And he took us through the entire shop, top to bottom, and said, we're so happy to have you. And it was such a much more open and receptive conversation than what I was expecting, especially since we had been put off by his public relations people for so long. All right, well, let's go back over here. Sure, of course.

Thank you. A quick chat? Yeah, absolutely. And what did he say to you in the interview? quick chat yeah absolutely and what did he say to you in the interview so at that point we had um we had two we had two thoughts we wanted to tell the story of decium and this upstart canadian company that is disrupting this multi multi-billion dollar beauty industry that in and of itself is an amazing story it It's extraordinary. Yeah, it's extraordinary.

It is. And then on top of that, we also had his personal story, which was completely interwoven with the corporate story. It was almost one and the same, but slightly different. And so we had to figure out, okay, where does the conversation begin? Obviously, it begins with the company, but we need to move into, Brandon, what's going on? So we started with the company, and he was amazingly forthright with that. When Canadians say they support Canadian business, they're referring to the organic egg farm from brunch.

When it comes to brands, you need to first make it in kind of the global picture, and then Canada starts to respect that it was from there. And we're experiencing that, and we're really proud of it and when we moved to him he was less forthright but at the same time more open than i expected that he would be you know we we questioned him about some of the videos when we talked about remember the paranoia and people are out to get me he dismissed it we're a beauty business if i was unsafe i wouldn't go on instagram and say, please come and save me. Either way, I don't understand their reaction. If they thought it was a movie, then please calm down,

have a shot of Don Julio. If you thought I needed help, why didn't you help me? You know, he didn't say it directly, but essentially it's Instagram. It's getting noticed. There was some speculation at the time that maybe this was all on purpose. Yes, because that was their entire strategy from the beginning was we're not going to do traditional marketing. And, you know, somebody told me recently that attention is the oxygen of marketing. Well, he was getting an

awful lot of oxygen. He was generating oxygen, tons of it. And, you know, whether that was positive or negative or there was a bit of a question about it, who cares? People were talking about it. It was generating attention. It's not a controversy. I'm not communicating political decision-making. I'm just saying, hello. If you don't like the way I say hello, you may still like the product. So there were a lot of skeptics and a lot of cynics. Part of me was wondering, hey, are we being taken in here? Is this all an act? Is he doing this simply to get somebody like us in there to do a story about him? There was even that possibility that we were being played. In the interview with you, he alluded to financial crimes. Yes. That was the first time that he had said that directly on camera, at least, sorry,

to our camera, to a mainstream media camera, not his own phone camera on Instagram. Yeah, I note this because it's a theme that's come up over the last year. He had mentioned that on Instagram. So I've been digging in the basements of Desiem because upstairs it all looks really clean. And I found some really bad wrongdoings by some of our shareholders. And I questioned him about it. And instead of answering it directly, he went off into this metaphor.

Because if you go down in the basement and you hear rats, the best news that can happen is if somebody comes and checks and there was no rat. The worst news that can happen is maybe you've got rats all over the roof. But I need to get to the bottom of that.

And I'm kind of looking at him going, well, that's probably one of the strangest answers I've ever had in an interview. When you left that interview, I'm curious, what did you think the future held for this Canadian upstart, Dessium? And Brandon as well. I thought he was impressive. He was articulate. He was quick. He was also odd. He didn't have talking points in terms of, you know, the usual

sort of interview, but he did have his own talking points, which were out there. Take me then to October, when things really start to come to a head. Right. In October, Brandon announced that he was ordering all of his stores to shut down. This is the final post of the SEM, which we will shut down all operations until further notice moves. We have two months. Please take me seriously. Again, because of what he called financial malfeasance. So this comes up again.

This comes up again. And he's still the CEO of this company, so he literally does order all of these stores to be shut down. It was his company. So stores shut down. And you can imagine what that's like. This is stores all over the world shutting down immediately. Supplies are cut off.

Distributors are upset. There are liens placed on Deciem, that sort of thing. I mean, this was a huge, huge problem. And the biggest problem, the biggest concern, was for their majority shareholder in Estee Lauder. And this is when Estee Lauder steps in. This is exactly when Estee Lauder steps in. When looking back, it's a little surprising

they didn't step in more before this, but legally they couldn't. So in Canadian business law, there's a provision that allows a company to come in and take a type of action when a shareholder, when it believes that the company is taking an action that's detrimental to the business. And that's what Estee Lauder said Brandon Truax was doing. So Estee Lauder filed this injunction in an Ontario court. Cosmetics company Estee Lauder owns one-third of Deciem and asked the court to remove him. The application says Truax had made outrageous and defamatory posts on social media. And I just want to read a couple of quotes from their lawyer who accused Brandon of, quote, essentially lighting the company on fire and accused him of behaving, quote, for lack of a better word, insane. Yes. We would never use that term, but

they did. And then Judge Michael Penny ordered that he be removed as CEO of this company. And after the judge handed down his decision, I texted him and he responded to me. And I said, what do you think of the judge's decision? He responded, I love it. And what do we know about his life over the last few months? This is really where the oddness started to go to the frightening. I should mention that after I texted him about the case and he said i love it he took a screen grab of that and he posted it along with my phone number on instagram with your phone with my phone number and my name i started getting phone calls i started getting

emails i started getting texts even other reporters but most of it was people who were actually some people even thought that that was brand's number. They didn't read my name. And they started texting me saying, Brandon, are you okay? Brandon, what can I do to help? Brandon, do you need me? And then he turned up in London and started posting more videos. London and started posting more videos. So what do we know about what happened in London in November of 2018? In London in November, he was committed to a mental hospital. In that mental institution, the London authorities, in trying to keep him, determined from their perspective that he was diagnosed with presumptive bipolar disorder. But Brandon fought that and his lawyer at the time said, no, this behavior was a result of being on magic mushrooms and drugs. And he was hallucinating. And in fact,

a week after he was released because they couldn't determine whether or not it was a mental illness or whether it was drugs. And because he wasn't determined to be a danger to himself or to others, they had to let him go. It's so tragic to me that all of this has been playing out so publicly on social media. It is. And it seems that, you know, that's been his rise and fall, right? I mean, at this point, the only words of support or actions or offers of support have come from social media. And that's where it really lit up again, with people pouring in saying, we need to help you. Brandon, you need help. Let us call somebody for you on your behalf. call somebody for you on your behalf. But really, it seems if you just go by the social media posts,

Brandon sloughed off most of that and denied that he had a problem and appeared to be mostly alone through that entire period, other than interacting with people on social media. Big problem has occurred. Brandon has now been at the hospital for about seven days. He hasn't had a psychotic issue or anything. He's been acting normally, but he's saying the same things. He's still talking about there are crimes associated with the business. There are things he wants to talk about. So what do we do now? What do we know about the last moments of Brandon Truax's life?

about the last moments of Brandon Truax's life? We don't know a lot other than what he himself has, again, posted on Instagram. So we have four videos that he recorded on Saturday, this past Saturday. Mr. President, it's Brandon Truax. You said your country absolutely has to be prioritized first. I'm in my penthouse. He was a little erratic, a little incoherent, and he actually mentioned where he lived, mentioned his home address, mentioned his actual apartment,

and said that he had been drinking, drinking mezcal. Because I've indulged in some alcohol on a Saturday evening, I'm enjoying a drunken behavior. Now, we know he has told other people in the past that he was on different types of medication. And now we have him saying, I'm drinking a fairly strong type of alcohol. I want everyone to learn,

if they're worried about something, not worry. If they suspect something is strange, as the airport authorities say, if it's suspicious, tell someone, I love you. And that's the last post. The last post was Saturday night. The police found him the next day. They got the call at 1.30 in the afternoon.

So he was essentially posting on Instagram pretty much up right to the moment he died. Aaron, I'm interested in your thoughts, having spent so much time thinking about this company and about Brandon Truax himself, what you think his legacy will be. think his legacy will be? I think his legacy will be one of somebody who pulled back the curtain and exposed the beauty industry for a lot of what it is. And that is an industry that for years, decades even, has exploited the fears of people, the fears of people growing old, the fears of people worried about their appearance, to charge them more money. And he took that and he ripped it apart. And he said, look, here's the reality. These things cost pennies. They cost pennies to discover. They cost pennies to make. And they should cost pennies to buy. And you are being scammed, his words, if you are paying these, you know, what he called extortionate prices for these products.

I think he'll be remembered as somebody who did that. I think he'll be remembered as somebody who was honest. That's one of the reasons why people liked his products, because they felt that he was being honest, that he wasn't trying to pull the wool over their eyes, that he was showing them something that they could easily have for a fair price. Aaron, thank you so much. My pleasure. On Monday, Dessium put out a statement about Brandon's death,

fittingly on its Instagram account. It read in part, Brandon, our founder and friend, you touched our hearts, inspired our minds, and made us believe that anything is possible. Thank you for every laugh, every learning, and every moment of your genius. In response to queries from the CBC about Brandon Truax's death, Toronto police said they received a call to attend the area around his home around 1.30pm on Sunday. At this time, it is a non-criminal and non-suspicious investigation, the police said. That's it for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner.

For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was, please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle and you can't put it back. Gay Girl Gone. Available now.