DECIEM The Abnormal Beauty Company, acquired by The Estée Lauder Companies in 2024, operates out of its Toronto, Canada, headquarters where it has five on-site R&D laboratories with more than 150 in-house scientists. On the other side of town, the company runs a 110,000 square-foot manufacturing hub where over 250,000 products are made each day. According to Dr. Carla O’Connor, senior director for global clinical research at DECIEM, this sets the scene for a highly structured new product development process that enables the company to maintain scientific integrity across its four core brands: The Ordinary, NIOD, Loopha and The Chemistry Brand.
“What really is key to having all of our infrastructure in one place is it allows for a collaborative environment,” O’Connor told attendees at the in-cosmetics Global tradeshow, which took place in Paris, France, in April. “It has really enabled a cohesive environment for work and this enables our speed and quality to market,” she said – a crucial aspect in today’s beauty market.
“The industry is ever-changing at a very fast pace and we need to be faster, sharper and more responsive, without losing our scientific rigor. And that is really key to DECIEM.”
Scientific ownership - the DECIEM approach
Across the five on-site laboratories, O’Connor said teams are split into three focus areas – preclinical discovery, delivery sciences and clinical operations – to ensure speed and responsiveness during research and development of new products.
The preclinical discovery team, she explained, is responsible for understanding ingredient function at a cellular level (mode of actions); delivery sciences is focused on understanding and quantifying ingredient and formulations efficacy; and clinical operations is responsible for proof-of-concept work, through in-house in vivo panels and external clinical claims substantiation.
“We want to be seen to be owning our own science for DECIEM,” the global executive said. The goal, she said, is to ensure robustness and “scientific ownership” from start to finish, across product efficacy, innovation and claims substantiation.
What helps here, is that the company centers everything on its science, she said. “The scientific pillar really drives the concepts of our products, then we work with the brands [team] to sell and tell our story,” she explained.
The branding, marketing and external communications then build out authority and trust, along with wider industry engagement work at conferences, through partnerships or via publication of scientific material, she said.
Social listening and data audits
Beyond this, on the consumer side, O’Connor said DECIEM is heavily invested in “social listening”; responding to all questions on social media and funneling real-time needs and feedback back into R&D. One good example of this was the recent reformulation and re-launch of The Ordinary’s Hyaluronic Acid (HA) based on widespread consumer feedback around the product’s texture, she said.
The company also works very closely with a set of external collaborators and partners to manage changing needs, working with them throughout new product development efforts as an “extension” to DECIEM’s laboratories, she said. “We are open; we show them the standard we expect. This helps us with our speed and our rigor.”
And DECIEM has a very concise model to audit supplier data, O’Connor said, ensuring every ingredient has sufficient biological and clinical evidence. “When working with our strategic suppliers, every ingredient is vetted across three tiers of testing: in vitro, ex vivo in cells and in vivo in skin. If we are looking at hydration, for example, we want to see markers within the cells that make sense.”
Over time, in following this audit model, she said the company has built up an important library of ingredients that are cross-referenced with clinical evidence which helps R&D make confident and speedy ingredient decisions, accelerating product development lead times. It also means every brand can “tell the story behind each of the ingredients”, she said.
Asked by Premium Beauty News how easy it will be for DECIEM to maintain this scientific ownership, social listening and auditing model when scaling further, O’Connor said: “We already operate on a very large scale; we are part of The Estée Lauder Companies and there’s a huge drive for collaboration, not just internally but also with our colleagues at Estée Lauder.”
But as the company grows further – internally and externally – the fact DECIEM is science-led and focused on mode of action and clinical storytelling versus brand-led means it will be “very easy” to maintain scientific rigor at scale, she said.
