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Rishabh Jain
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The Ordinary | Confetti's Verdict ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Confetti Design Studio has analysed the naming system, packaging and pricing architecture of The Ordinary. It is the Toronto brand that decided to call a product Niacinamide 10% + Zinc 1% and in doing so made a generation of consumers fluent in skincare chemistry.
Launched in August 2016 with 27 products at once under parent company DECIEM. Founded in 2013 by Brandon Truaxe and Nicola Kilner. It reached $300 million in sales by 2017 and $460 million in the year to January 2021.
The Estee Lauder Companies invested in early 2017 and took a majority stake in 2021. Then completed full acquisition on 31 May 2024 for a total investment of roughly $1.7 billion.
The audit looks at whether a brand's naming and packaging can keep standing for honesty and simplicity, now that it's owned by one of the very companies it once positioned itself against. This audit is as per September 2026.
For nearly a century, beauty naming followed the same playbo
ok.
An evocative name, a vague promise of a benefit, and the real ingredients tucked away in a tiny type nobody ever reads.
But The Ordinary broke that pattern.
It named its products after what's actually in them, and how much like Niacinamide 10% + Zinc 1%. That choice does something powerful. A customer who buys Niacinamide 10% + Zinc 1% actually learns what niacinamide is.
The Ordinary taught an entire generation how to read skincare labels, a shift brands like Minimalist and The Derma Co are still benefiting from in India today.
That same naming choice also created an advantage.
When someone searches "niacinamide serum," The Ordinary is quite literally the product they're searching for. It shows in the numbers too, independent data puts the brand's visibility score at 99 out of 100, with around 5.4 million monthly site visits.
Prestige skincare packaging usually exists to justify a price. Weight, finish, foil, even the satisfying resistance of a cap, all of it is designed to make you feel like you're paying for something special.v
The Ordinary came up with Plain white and off-white. Small, utilitarian type with no imagery at all. And for many products, just a simple glass vial with a dropper.
The plain packaging is the whole point.
If a brand says you’re paying for ingredients, not marketing, it has to show it. A heavy, glossy box that looks expensive would tell you the opposite.
The logo works the same way, black text on white, with no colour and no flourishes. It’s as straightforward as the box it sits on.
Even the dropper earns its place. It looks clinical and since it gives you one drop at a time, a bottle goes further.
The logo, the box and the dropper are all saying the same thing.
Most brands treat pricing as an output that feels heavily calculated and positioned and never well explained to the end user.
The Ordinary made its pricing the point. Products historically sat at roughly $7 to $10 against category equivalents at $30 to $100.
More importantly, the brand actually explained its thinking out loud. Price comes down to ingredient cost and formulation, not marketing spend. Nicola Kilner says luxury should mean authenticity, whatever the price tag happens to be.
The brand has also stayed honest even when it was uncomfortable. In 2022 and 2023, when prices went up, they explained why, pointing to inflation and rising costs, instead of just quietly raising prices and hoping nobody noticed.
A brand built on transparency actually being transparent about its own price hikes is rare.
There's a well-known strategy of launching with just one product, so people focus all their attention on it.
But The Ordinary did the opposite. In August 2016, it launched with 27 products at once, because if you're selling a whole system, you need to show up as a system. A single serum would have made The Ordinary look like just another product on the shelf, instead of a real challenge to how skincare gets priced and sold.
The way the range is organised backs this up too.
Products aren't grouped by "ritual" or by skin concern, the way most beauty brands do it. They're grouped by active ingredients, the way a chemist would think about them.
That means customers can build their own routine, piece by piece, instead of buying a pre-packaged set at whatever price the brand decides.
The results speak for themselves. Sephora picked up the line in 2017, the same year The Ordinary crossed $300 million in sales. And DECIEM grew fast too, from around 200 employees to more than 1,300.
Brandon Truaxe co-founded the company in 2013. But in October 2018, amid a period of real public instability, an Estée Lauder lawsuit removed him as CEO. He passed away in January 2019.
Nicola Kilner, who'd co-founded DECIEM alongside him, stepped in as sole CEO that same month and rebuilt the company from there.
During the 2020 pandemic, she committed to no layoffs, gave pay premiums to staff working on-site, and brought in mental health counselling across the business.
DECIEM survived because the brand's promise never lived in one founder's personality. It lived in the formula, and in the price on the label.
Beauty brands usually chase the extraordinary. Miracle claims. Serums that promise to transform skin overnight.
So the name "The Ordinary" was, in its own way, a small act of defiance.
Everything about the brand comes back to one simple idea, good skincare is about getting the job done. A product earns your trust when it does what it says it will, and most of the time that is all you really want from it.
That is the thinking behind the name “ordinary.” The products have plain names that tell you what is inside. The claims stay modest and truthful, so you know what to expect each time you use them. Each product is made to do one job well, and it gets on with that job quietly.
This feels refreshing in an industry that has long leaned on big promises, glamorous packaging and a lot of showmanship.
“Ordinary” keeps everything honest, clear and easy to understand, so people can pick what they need and see the results for themselves.
You can see it in how the brand talks about its products: backed by research, made by real chemists, built for function. It leaves out anything the skin doesn’t need, which is the brand living up to its own name.
The pricing fits the same idea. The Ordinary keeps its language plain and its prices low, because good skincare should be something anyone can reach, understand and trust.
Niacinamide 10% + Zinc 1% is a name that only means something if you know what niacinamide does. The Ordinary knows this, and instead of leaving shoppers to work it out alone, the brand has made teaching a part of what it does.
The range is large and organised by ingredient, so some people need help knowing what to pair together and in what order. For years, outsiders filled that gap: creators, comparison sites and Reddit threads. Now the brand is stepping in itself.
In January 2025, it launched The Truth Should Be Ordinary, a free digital archive that busts skincare myths. In February 2026, it opened a lab-inspired pop-up in Shoreditch, where people could talk to its scientists face to face.
Both show a brand that wants to explain its own products and not leave that job to the internet. That fits the same idea as everything else: if you tell people the truth plainly, they can decide for themselves.
The promise was simple: you pay for what is in the bottle, not for the marketing. That is a hard promise to keep for years, because costs keep climbing. Ingredients, shipping and wages all get more expensive.
Most brands can raise prices and nobody minds. The Ordinary is in a different position, because its low prices were the proof. The gap between its prices and the rest of the category showed shoppers that the category had been overcharging. If that gap shrinks, the proof gets weaker, and people start to doubt whether the promise still holds.
So the challenge is what happens when costs rise. Even a small increase gets read as a broken promise.
Estee Lauder completed its acquisition of DECIEM on 31 May 2024, for a total investment of roughly $1.7 billion.
It's also worth remembering, it was Estée Lauder's own lawsuit that removed the founder back in October 2018.
To be fair to everyone involved, the brand hasn't actually changed much since the acquisition. Products are still named the exact same blunt way, straight ingredient and percentage. No softer, prettier names have crept in. The pricing logic hasn't shifted either. So far, at least on paper, Estée Lauder has left the brand alone to keep being exactly what it always was.
But there's still a real tension here, and it's not about anyone doing anything wrong. It's structural. The Ordinary's whole identity was built in opposition, standing against an industry that priced products on mystique and mystery. And now, that same brand sits inside one of the biggest companies in that very industry.
H3: Keep Doing What Works, Even Under Estée Lauder 🌱
The Ordinary is already doing the right things, so the best advice is to keep doing them.
Plain black text on white, simple boxes, lab-style droppers. It all says one thing that is ‘you pay for what’s inside the bottle’. People spot it from across a shelf and trust it before reading a word.
The brand shows the product, explains it simply and lets real people share real results. Keep working with creators who are clear and honest.
The Ordinary began by standing up to big beauty brands, and now it sits inside one. Staying true to themselves and how they started with open ingredients, fair prices, and plain words is important.
The Ordinary made one of the most important branding decisions in modern skincare.
Naming a product Niacinamide 10% + Zinc 1%. Pricing it far below what others charged. Packing it like it came from a lab and not a beauty counter. All three said the same thing that is ‘you can handle the truth’.
And it worked. The brand grew to $460 million by 2021, and today it's one of Estée Lauder's fastest-growing names.
But its real impact goes beyond its own sales. It created an entire generation of customers who now actually understand skincare ingredients, and every "actives" brand since has been selling to that same educated customer.
The next chapter is about the price gap that once made The Ordinary feel like a moral stand is slowly shrinking. And the brand is now fully owned by exactly the kind of company it once positioned itself against.
If you are building a skincare brand in this crowded market it takes more than a good product. It takes a clear story. At Confetti, we turn what you believe into a name, a price and a pack that all say the same thing. Get in touch with our team at Confetti.
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