The Ordinary: What Are These Sweet Priced Vials REALLY Worth?

Far ahead of any other subject, the number of questions I received on The Ordinary Brand Products Pakistan broke all records! It took me a while to form an opinion, I tested products and went back and forth with the brand several times to clarify certain points. Here is the fateful article that many of you have been waiting for!

THE ORDINARY: MY OPINION

The Ordinary belongs to the DECIEM group and was founded in 2013 by Brandon Truaxe, an Iranian-Canadian visionary, who unfortunately died very prematurely only a few months ago (like any genius, his dark side has unfortunately taken over). He leaves behind a flourishing group, with 5 pillar brands to his credit:

  • ·         The Ordinary
  • ·         NIOD: the one that interests me the most
  • ·         Hylamide
  • ·         The Chemistry Brand
  • ·         Fountain: I regret to announce that the brand has ceased its activity for the moment (they made, among other things, hyaluronic acid and collagen to drink)

Brandon's idea? Being neither a chemist, nor a cosmetics formulator, nor even a marketer (he is a computer scientist), he was passionate about beauty and decided to offer products at fair prices! Do the opposite of what everyone else is doing and thus change the beauty world!

Do you think that was already the case for "products at fair prices"?

If you know a little about the world of marketing, you know that the cost price of a product is sometimes very far from its displayed retail price. The Abnormal Compagnie, the little name given by Brandon to his company, therefore had the ambition to offer us treatments at prices... which are worth their price! Inevitably, this had a bomb effect on a market that once had to "make us dream" in order to sell better.

Their answer: everything is based on sales VOLUMES. It is true that when we sell 1,000,000 units or 1,000 units the price, we pay for our raw materials is not the same. When you buy 50 liters of rosehip oil or 5,000 liters from a producer, you do not pay the same price per liter (the more you take, the lower the price). And it is true that the volumes of the brand are impressive! I asked for the number of units sold in 2019 for two products:

Hyaluronic Acid 2% + B5: 3,700,000 units

It's a lot! I cannot give you comparative volumes of other brands (this is confidential information and I was already lucky that The Ordinary agreed to communicate it to me), but take my word for it, it is clearly less with niche brands (for Pai, Skin Ceuticals we will talk about thousands of bottles but not millions).

100% cold-pressed organic rosehip oil (from Bulgaria): 1,000,000 units

when they started, they did not have these volumes: knowing that selling at a loss is prohibited, this means that their margin was close to 0 and that the cost prices of raw materials (since such volumes could not be at RDV at launch) are definitely not very high

the difference in price of raw materials compared to volumes is significant but is not progressive: imagine that you buy 10 liters of rosehip oil at 10€ per litre, when you take 100 liters the price increases to 8€ / liter, and when you take 300 liters it goes to 7.65€ / liter. Even if you take 800 liters the price will not be able to drop significantly. In reality, the difference between the prices for 10 liters and 800 liters is not astronomical

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