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This post was updated Friday, February 23rd at 8:59 pm.

After a few quiet weeks, beauty company Deciem finds itself back in the spotlight. Yesterday Racked broke the news that the company, which owns popular skincare brand The Ordinary, had lost co-CEO Nicola Kilner and CFO Stephen Kaplan. This came a few weeks after a period of intense scrutiny of founder Brandon Truaxe, whose increasingly erratic-appearing behavior on Instagram concerned fans of the brand. Stories from former employees then emerged, painting a picture of some chaos behind the scenes at the company as well.

Truaxe has since confirmed that Kilner was indeed fired and that CFO Stephen Kaplan, who had been with the company for less than a year, had resigned. Truaxe forwarded several internal Deciem emails to Racked, including information about the inner financial workings of the company and conversations with employees. In one email to Racked, he said the goal in sending these was “transparency,” and in another, he wrote: “There’s no trouble at Deciem. We are exploding, our customers love us and the drama media is creating will eventually die off and be discredited to your disadvantage.”

A post shared by THE ABNORMAL BEAUTY COMPANY (@deciem) on Feb 5, 2018 at 6:09am PST

One shared email exchange was with Dr. Tijion Esho, the London-based cosmetic doctor who launched a lip-care line, called Esho, with Deciem. In a now-deleted Instagram post that arguably garnered Deciem and Truaxe the most online backlash during a week of heightened publicity, Truaxe ended his company’s relationship with Esho and said he was going to return the Esho brand’s trademarks. In an email, Truaxe told Esho he had to do it publicly, writing, “My partners would have never allowed me to freely give you this trademark after our investment to register it and develop the range.” In an exchange dated a few weeks later, Esho stated, “I think that I’m allowed to feel frustrated and upset,” and Truaxe responded, “You’re being very mean to me despite my explanation to you…”

In a statement provided to Racked by Esho’s representative, he said that he had been working with Kilner to recover his trademark and product formulations. Since her departure from the company two days ago, he notes a timeline is now “unconfirmed” and the fate of the line “undecided.” He hopes to still meet with Truaxe (who was in London this week, although Esho said that due to scheduling difficulties, a meeting was impossible) “to close this chapter.” He also wrote, in response to emails he received from Deciem employees, “I extended my gratitude and admiration for the individuals in the Deciem team. They showed me a lot of support and believed in me so I continue to be extremely grateful to that.”

The firing of co-CEO Nicola Kilner, which is likely to cause temporary confusion for the third parties she was responsible for working with, was a surprising development; she and Truaxe have always appeared to have a close bond. Kilner and Shamin Mohamed Jr., Deciem’s director of operations, had a now-disputed conversation about Truaxe’s mental health. When the CEO heard about it, it led to mistrust on his part. Truaxe eventually sided with Mohamed, a longtime friend whom he knew prior to starting Deciem, and questioned Kilner’s loyalty. When the blow-up occurred, Truaxe was visiting the brand’s Covent Garden store for a customer meet-and-greet and a visit from Estée Lauder, which has a minority stake in the brand.

Neha Gupta, Deciem’s human resources director, was there, and she described the scene on a call. “Brandon was crying on the floor. He was devastated,” she says. Gupta delivered the news to Kilner that she was being terminated after the decision was made.

Kilner offered only this statement: “I love Brandon and the team unconditionally and am too hurt to comment further.”

“I don’t want to let people go,” Truaxe says. “Hiring people is difficult. Firing them is very difficult, but when you have no choice, you have no choice. Ultimately, it doesn’t affect me. The only thing that matters is that the consumers are buying the product. But the drama is just hurting my team.”

Losing CFO Stephen Kaplan will also likely negatively affect the company, at least for a while. Kaplan, reached on a call while on vacation, confirmed he had resigned. Truaxe shared Kaplan’s official resignation email with Racked. It read, in part: “Taking into account everything that has been going on over the last few days, and especially after seeing your email regarding Nicola’s termination; I see no reason for my continued presence at Deciem.”

Truaxe says, “Stephen came to clean up our financials.” He then notes that perhaps it was a mistake to have given Kaplan “a little bit of power” in the company. “It is really destructive that Stephen could not just accept the fact that a 40-year-old is the CEO, and in his 60s he’s reporting to me.”

Kaplan declined to discuss the details, but says he came to his decision a few weeks ago, while also noting he really enjoyed his time at the company at first. “If anybody says anything, they’re terminated,” he says. “It’s not the way I want to live; it’s not the way you want to run a business. I think, unfortunately, in reality the two people who really tried to have Brandon’s back and the business’s back were Nicola and I. I am always going to voice my opinion; nothing’s going to hold me back. And Brandon didn’t like it.”

Truaxe also shared an email detailing a laundry list of financial projects that Kaplan had been working on with his team. One involves an audit in which there was an accounts receivable issue that could potentially result in an income reduction for the company of 3.2 million Canadian dollars (about $2.5 million). Of this, Truaxe says, “He screwed up the audit.” However, industry sources note that an adjustment like this can be normal for a growing company. Without more information and context, it’s impossible to analyze the meaning of this information.

“There were a lot of numbers that we had to just work out,” Kaplan says. “Deciem didn’t have books that were done that were easy to work on, so in this last week or so I worked out that it was an issue we better resolve when I got back.” (He had planned a vacation prior to resigning.)

Estée Lauder remains a minority investor with the company. Truaxe told Women’s Wear Daily that its investment was 28 percent and his was 72 percent. When asked by Racked about keeping the business on track after these new developments, he says, “We’re on track. Nothing has changed. Our business has exploded. We’ve gone from $45 million to $260 million this year. Why is nobody saying, ‘What an amazing story!’?”

After Kilner was fired, Truaxe sent an email (shared with Racked) to Leonard Lauder, patriarch of the Lauder family and chairman emeritus of the Estée Lauder Companies. It read, in part:

I’m out of breath and have left our store. I’ll terminate Nicola with generosity and gentleness tonight. If your team starts to worry, please let them know that I am calm and am not making any irrational decisions. I’m worried about your team’s view of me more than anything... I’m so sorry, Leonard. I know you did not invest in me to live a painful drama. I’ll work hard to make it up to you and your team.

It’s unclear if Lauder responded. An Estée Lauder representative sent the following statement: “The Estée Lauder Companies is a minority investor in Deciem, and, as such, we do not have the power to control the company’s operations, social media or personnel decisions. We believe in Deciem’s incredible creativity, innovation and product offerings.”

Besides expressing some concerns about raising more working capital, Truaxe is confident about Deciem’s future. He anticipates that two new manufacturing facilities will open in April. He claims Deciem has six new manufacturing partners and that the company has been producing “millions of units more” per month. Many of The Ordinary’s products are currently sold out at Sephora.

When asked if he had spoken to Sephora representatives about the recent company shake-ups, Truaxe said he hadn’t. “I love them. But if they don’t want to be my partner, that’s okay, because we are the ones driving the sales, not them. It’s consumer demand,” he says. “If Sephora wants to kick us out because Nicola has left, that’s okay. The customer will come to us directly... I’m happy with [our] store growth.” Truaxe also mentioned that products would be entering Ulta, though that partnership had been delayed “over a year” because of stock issues. An Ulta representative said in a statement, “While we have no news to share at this time, we are always looking at new, relevant brands to expand our product assortment so we can continue to delight our guests.”

Finally, what does Truaxe make of the backlash from fans for his sometimes unconventional social media posts and those who perceived he had insulted them on Instagram? “They insulted me,” he says, voice rising. “It’s my brand. People who have never had a job in their life successfully are not going to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do. If they don’t like it, Instagram allows you to block me, it allows you not to follow me, but you cannot stand there and say what I can or cannot do. There was only one day I got emotional.”

Truaxe started this whole conversation by discussing his former employees, saying, “I don’t want to hurt them. I just want them to stop hurting me.” He ended the conversation on the same theme.

“When employees leave, they leave with a grudge, they leave with anger, which is on both sides. But if you fuel that, anger is the most powerful emotion, but it lasts only a second,” Truaxe says. “Love takes longer, but it continues. I love our team. We’re happy. Why would I destroy the most beautiful thing I’ve built? It doesn’t make emotional sense, it doesn’t make financial sense... The proof is always in what the consumer thinks. Go and read our reviews. Go read the people who met me at the Covent Garden store, go on our Instagram and see what they’re saying about me. The truth is very obvious.”

Update 2/23/18 at 8:59 pm:

After this story was published, Kaplan sent some of his own email correspondence with Truaxe to Racked, noting that it was “factually incorrect” to say the audit issue was his fault, and that he had offered to return to Deciem to help sort through the issue, which predated his tenure there. In a subsequent call to Racked, Kaplan just wanted to note that he felt that Truaxe’s “blind loyalty to the core team” was a major problem.

Updated 2/23/18 at 4:24 pm with a statement from Ulta.