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Nicola Kilner

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2023-06-05
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2023-06-05
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  1. “No, and again, like I think in the early days everyone's round the same table. You've got Predby who's making formulations, Dion's doing comms and brand, like everyone's just there talking, coming up with ideas. And that's that collaboration is so special. And, you know, you're in the WhatsApp groups and you're like, have you seen this? Let's do this. And also I think, you know, the other thing in the early days, being agile is so important. And everyone was okay. You could work on something and the next day there'd be a change of decision or someone had a different view and you're like, oh, actually, let's go in that direction now. That gets harder, I think, as you get bigger, and actually there are many more teams and there's more people involved.”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Is trying to get that balance and I think it'd be interesting, you know, and again with my husband who's a different stage of startup, I always just find it interesting around like I think especially in today's world like we're so much more aware about mental health and burnout and actually how to be much more respectful of balance Which I don't know if we necessarily had back then, but equally I feel like again we were pretty much a bunch of young twenty year olds with Brendan you know being a little bit older who are all just happy and loved what we were doing and when you start creating things and you start to see the results of your work then that drives you even further and then that makes it even more exciting because you know you can see what you're achieving is actually meaning something”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “You come up with the best ideas. When you're doing something on the weekend and you're not in that kind of Monday to Friday night or five zone, that's when that creativity, I think, happens. And I think, you know, people spend so long in the workplace. And that's why it's so important that actually people enjoy coming in. The one thing that I say has definitely been a purposeful shift is I look back at early startup culture and I don't know if it's always kind. There is very high expectations and again if you're working, you know, I'm calm. Brandon is very high passion, high expectations. You know, there's this people feel like they need to work on the weekends and the evenings and is that healthy even though actually.”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “And that's why it was so difficult when we went through the unthinkable and things became so difficult because it wasn't a colleague like you've just lived this incredible journey of us all traveling together, building something so special like just this such a sense of we're all in this together like even when times are hard like we've got each other's backs and things may not work out but actually let's just have fun let's learn things and let's just keep trying like let's never be afraid to fail and let's just do it together”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Yeah, well, they always say that, you know, you can complain about your parents, but if anyone else has a bad word about your parents, you're like, no, even if they're saying the same thing you've said. And Desium's like that, you know, like you can complain like internally like maybe there's not this process, but anyone says a bad word, you come straight to the defense. But I think it was just so much love and passion. And again, Brandon cared for all of us like he had so much love that you gave it back”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “We would have taken a bullet for each other, and I think even now within Decimon we're fifteen hundred people now, but we still have so many of those early team members. It is, but actually a very healthy one.”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Yeah, so I think it was around building a family of he never wanted anyone to leave him and He wanted Desium to be a place of belonging and actually even now we have belonging as our kind of North Star like the most important thing anyone in our team should feel is that they belong at Decium Whoever they are, whatever they believe in, like there is a place for them at Decium. And I think that really comes from this sense of family. And I think And you know, again, like I even look at my husband's word, I do think startups because you're working in a very intense environment. It does build relationships far deeper than well I ever experienced at boots and that I think would exist in incorporates. To this sense of family, I think, you know”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “It was never work and I think that's what so many of us felt weekends, evenings like we wanted to be doing Dessian because we were all friends, we were all eating together, we were going to Niagara Falls on the weekend, we were going to a theme park in Toronto, like we were just having fun whilst we were doing everything.”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “prioritizing which restaurants we were going to, where's got the best ice cream, what are we going to go and do here? And actually the work was something that came alongside it. He also had this, you know, he had this philosophy he wanted to build a family. He'd had, you know, a troubled upbringing. I think he'd always, you know, he'd actually had this pattern. I think have always leaving a business when it kind of just went on the verge of success. Desienne was his fourth business. He had a tech business and he had two beauty businesses, Euka then indeed before Desi. And each time what hurt him was actually leaving the relationships and the people behind. So his viewpoint of Desium was actually how do we build a family like a work family? But I think he”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “So Brandon was eccentric, the He was, I'd say, we're both very passionate. He was a lot more eccentric and I'm a lot more calm. I think would be a big difference. But I guess also from a skill set, you know, he was so into the genius when it came to science. He was a tech person originally. So he came from things with a very, he didn't understand gray. It was black and white. And actually that was quite a good way to actually approach the science, I think, behind beauty products. He was at time short tempered. I'd be the kind of smoothing things out and he would kind of be a little bit more hot-headed. But again, I think it was, you know, a startup culture is not for everyone, but for me those first few years were incredible. But he also just had this amazing way of making things fun, you know, like when we were plan trips to go on meetings, he would be prioritized.”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “preconditioned ideas about the beauty industry, about the way things should be, everyone was approaching it just with a almost a very practical viewpoint. And I think that made a big difference too. what others aren't doing was almost never something that had to be discussed because people hadn't worked for the other conglomerates for all the years”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “So I'd say the downside in the later years is because the ordinary has become such a huge success when the ordinary took off, the other brands got pushed aside, because it's very difficult if you have one brand that's really driving such a huge portion of your revenues. When everyone is, you know, facing high workload, that always gets prioritized. So then you end up ignoring the other brand's versus if they had a dedicated team in. It's something now we want to actually restart our incubator engine and actually the only way we can do that is by having a dedicated team to that. So there are downsides. I think the other thing that made a huge difference for us because we didn't have much money as a startup and we obviously wanted to hire all of these people. We couldn't afford experience. So everyone who was hired was pretty much straight out of university, straight out of college, just applied for their first job. And actually that meant no one really had.”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Just set up this incredible structure that we could fail, we could keep trying things, we could fail relatively cheaply, quickly and kind of start the next thing.”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “I understand why they're in this situation, but so many entrepreneurs have to outsource everything they go to the PR agency they go to a lab, they go to someone to do your R&D, and then you're really just coordinating all of those efforts rather than I mean, so it was a privilege we could build this whole ecosystem because then at the table everyone sat there, everyone's generating ideas. And again, you know, if I think around like doing Commson has, it's a lot for one brand to pay, but if you've got ten brands, suddenly you can look at it as ten percent of everyone's salary. If I'm flying to Australia to me to buy a well, do I want to present one brand or do I present ten brands? And also just, you know, you don't know what's going to if you're in consumer brand until it starts selling, you don't really know what's going to be. You can do all the research and all of the insights in the world until something gets traction, you don't really know what's going to work.”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “So in Atria Office in Melbourne we used to have on the wall focuses overrated because everyone does tell you not to do 10 things at once. And actually there were so many benefits to doing 10 things at once. So first of all, it was this viewpoint of trying to create this ecosystem of how do we have our own manufacturing do our own comms in house because And again it takes funds to set up that ecosystem, but also you know so many entrepreneurs which”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “with me and I'll help do the beauty we went on to call it beauty wise with you. So then obviously, I made the decision to leave boots. Obviously, I was at the age of 24, 23, 24. And I remember telling mum and everyone's like, oh, like you're in a really good business, you've got a good, like you're already achieving things. But I just knew that I wasn't meant to be there forever. So I left him ten years ago and then it was the start of Decium.”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “So then when he was next in London I met up with him, and after he told me about his reasons for leaving he was going to do this next thing and I'd always kind of had this viewpoint of wanting to do my own business and ever since I worked in Buta I found that you know I always had friends, family, everyone asking what's the best mascara, what's the best foundation and just how we'd go to trip advisor you know to look at kind of ratings and reviews for restaurants and hotels I wanted to create the same thing for beauty that actually ranked the products I told Brenda my idea and said I want to do this and like what do you think do you have any advice and he told me he wanted to start something called Decium which was from the Latin word for the number ten it wasn't designed to be a beauty engine at that time there was a beauty concept but there was a technology concept there was a food concept of kind of just lots of different ideas generating but with this viewpoint of doing 10 things at once so we said why don't you come in help do destiny”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Yeah, so I remember he suddenly left in Dude's labs. Now in Dudle Labs he founded it, it was a rocket ship, it was kind of doing super well. I remember getting this message from him that he left and just being like shocked as in like what has happened.”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Walls with kind of this infectious energy. And I remember just from the day I met him thinking, gosh, I always want this person in my life because he just had this aurora and just someone who you knew wanted to actually also make the world a better place and kind of really cared about doing good and doing things differently.”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Yeah, so he was with his previous business, which was called Indeed Labs, and we launched a couple of their products through this program Latest Finds. So I'd worked with him and I remember, you know, and actually when I, this sounds alien now so many years ago, but you couldn't check your emails when you left the office. So often every morning I'd come in and I was dealing with a lot of international entrepreneurs. So I'd always come into like an inbox full of emails. I always remember looking for his name because his email was always so full of energy. He always signed it off Smiles Brandon. You know just someone whose positivity, his passion just kind of really shone through that I'd always go straight to his emails kind of open it and you know the launches that we did with Brandon indeed loves were some of the most successful we did through the through the innovation program and he was just you know when he used to come to the boots head office in Nottingham just it was bouncing off the”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Ellen, I'm very fortunate for that, and then that's also how I met Brandon. So actually had a huge impact in obviously my next stage too.”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “And that just really suited my skill set because it was a very entrepreneurial role because actually I very much guided them with PR agencies and actually how to build the plan and you know we used to have the saying of like launch and love because actually it's one thing to get a listing of boots it's another thing for your product to actually be picked and taken off the shelf like the listing is just the first thing you know you you have to drive consumers you have to have that entire plan and I think it was just a really good way of actually learning from working with supply chain working with finance doing the checks with legal can we do this what can we say it was a really good sense of actually working with so many different departments and actually starting to understand I think consumer goods learning demand learning how to create it so I feel like that role was created which really just suited my skill set incredibly well”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “So when I was at, I then stayed on and I was an assistant buyer to begin with. And then I got promoted to be a buying manager for them, which was really around relationships. It was about collaboration. It was about looking around the world, seeing new technologies, finding the innovation, new brands”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “And if you are someone who's kind of got this strong drive to make a change, then, you know, entrepreneurship, I think, is just an incredible area. And even if it's not your idea, but going to join a startup, it's just incredible energy. would always be what I would recommend.”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “So I actually would always probably recommend during a few years in a corporate because I have to say at Boots I learnt so much. You know, you learn the things that they do really well. You learn the things that they do not necessarily wrong, but just the drawbacks of being such a big organization. So I think more than going to your university, like those two placement years I did at Booth, I learned incredibly so much. And depending on the kind of person you are, you know, if you go to a big corporate, it's so difficult to impart the culture there because there's just so many people, there's so much history.”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “You learn that at university, or do you learn that in doing? So I came across this course, which was business management in company, which is quite a unique course, which was at Nottingham Trent University. So it's sponsored by different Blue Chip companies. So Rolls-Royce, Boots, Barclays, Tesco's companies like that. They take on 40 people into this course. We would work four and a half days a week for which I've accompanied a sponsoring us. And then the other half day was kind of our study time, although obviously there was much more than that. And actually we were then, we'd go, so I chose boots. Well, we went through interviews. Boots was my first choice and I was lucky to get there.”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Yeah, so it was actually interesting because I never knew if I wanted to go to university or not because, you know, I believe in university very much if you want to become a doctor, you want to become a lawyer, you know, there are subjects that you really need to learn. Business is one of those where it's always hard”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Financial freedom is probably through entrepreneurship in some way, so I always kind of had this dream of almost just doing something of my twenties, kind of making all the sacrifices, to build up enough freedom that then actually going on to have a family, I could make the choices to really spend my time where I wanted to”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Actually, a combination of kind of almost two what I don't think needs to be extremes anymore, but kind of I think originally would have been seen as two. One was actually a stay-at-home mum because I think I'd seen my mum obviously just in that role and I've always been very maternal. of having children, except I always wanted freedom. I never wanted to rely on anyone else, and I think I'd always kind of been interested in entrepreneurship watch Dragon's Den from, you know, quite a young age. I always just had this feeling that actually the only way to really achieve that.”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “So I think quite a traditional, because mum stayed at home, so she did do the cooking, the cleaning in just a very caring, you know, she says with my children today, it makes me so happy because I know what kind of mum she was and just knowing that that love that they're going to have. My father was very great sense of humor, always very playful, very inspiring, very charismatic, always had kind of Ideas, kind of high energy. My mum was much more reserved, more of an introvert. My dad was kind of always the people person, always kind of very busy socially. Mum was very calm. Dad would have a temper sometimes, but nothing too much.”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Gone from someone who there was just so much warmth, just this coldness in his eyes. If I was suddenly pushed out of everything and then I got fired use of emails were being sent, firing people and copying the whole company in. Everything was paid out on Instagram saying he was shutting down the entire company. The shareholders had to step in. But then things just seemed to keep spiraling. Now don't watch you to help him.”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Minute in launch, we couldn't keep it in stock, producing 400,000 units every single day and valued at 2.2 billion US dollars. It truly happened what felt like overnight.”

    2023-06-05 · The Diary of a CEO · A Billion dollar NIGHTMARE! The Disturbing Drama Behind The Scenes Of A Billion Dollar Beauty Business. The Ordinary - Nicola Kilner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT