Kilner says those products aren’t in Hong Kong yet because there isn’t enough stock, but when you insist on manufacturing everything in-house – even when you become a massive global brand with impressive speed – that’s how it is.

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“I joined in 2013 when there were five of us,” Kilner says. Now Deciem employs 800 people worldwide.

“Back in the early days, when you don’t know if people will buy your products, whoever was around would end up working in the factory. Brandon would be right next to me sealing tubes.”

It took less than 10 minutes for Kilner to mention Brandon Truaxe, the founder of Deciem – a reminder of how integral he was, and is, to the brand. How loved he was, and how much he’s missed after his death in Toronto, Canada, in January this year.

Eccentric and ambitious, Truaxe did something unconventional when he envisioned his beauty start-up.

“The idea was if we built 10 brands at once it’ll create this ecosystem that allowed us to do everything in-house,” Kilner says. “The challenge of having one brand is: could that brand really justify having its own manufacturing facility, marketing, etc? Probably not. But if you have 10 brands, each brand could pay 10 per cent of the manufacturing.”

Essentially, Truaxe’s vision was to create 10 team players who supported each other to succeed. And it worked. Kind of.

“Brandon used to say, ‘You need to get 1,000 people to love you before you can get a million people to like you’.”

Deciem means “10” in Latin; The Ordinary was the company’s 11th brand, so a lot of its predecessors didn’t work. The time it did, though: way more than 1,000 people loved it. Today, Deciem has 631,000 followers on Instagram, and its best- and second-best performing stores are in London and Seoul, South Korea, respectively.

Kilner describes the nascent stages of Deciem as like being on a roller coaster. The Ordinary was launched in the company’s third year, which meant three years of making products they truly believed in and wanted people to fall in love with – to no avail. So “when the sales [for The Ordinary] came in we were like, ‘This must be a mistake!’ It spiralled out of control, which was amazing to watch,” Kilner says.

What struck a chord with consumers was how The Ordinary took the guesswork out of skincare, and its affordable, back-to-basics concept. Kilner likens it to aspirin, a product consumers know is safe, works, and shouldn’t cost a fortune – so why should skincare be different?

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Unfortunately, with success came challenges – not only professional, but personal.

Kilner and the team could only watch and try to be supportive as 2018 proved to be a most difficult year for Truaxe and those who built Deciem with him. It made matters worse when he kept pushing away anyone who tried to help him.

“It was a helpless time full of frustrations,” Kilner says, “and it’s made me want to learn more about [mental health] so we can understand how to help those situations have a different ending.”

The noise on social media and the unkindness there directed at Truaxe towards the end was another burden, and Kilner found too many people will speak harshly behind the anonymity of a profile. “We need to tackle saying things thinking you won’t be held accountable for them. If you’re not going to say it in real life, you shouldn’t say it online,” she says.

Though a trying time for all, Truaxe’s final year may have been harder still for Kilner. She was fired, rehired, became a mother for the first time, and replaced him as CEO when minority shareholder Estée Lauder Companies sued to have Truaxe removed as head of Deciem.

On top of all that, she had to watch her best friend struggle with demons she couldn’t help him fight.

“It’s the hardest thing any of us have had to go through to watch someone you love in a really bad situation you can’t do anything about,” she says. “But the team stuck by to keep Deciem afloat, to continue building it in any way we could, to protect it so when Brandon got better he could come back and it could go back to the way it was.”

She speaks with such hope one might think he was still alive; and in a way, he is. Truaxe didn’t only leave behind an empire and a legacy, he left behind a better understanding of what a company should be, and how it should be run. Through being his co-founder and partner, Kilner is today an energetic advocate for mental health and kindness – both in and out of the workplace. Through being his friend, she is now a strong believer in self-care.

“You just have to take that time out,” Kilner says. “As a company we’ve introduced mental health days to better support our team members. We work in the beauty industry, it’s supposed to be a beautiful place. We should be making people feel good, and if people aren’t feeling good then it’s not OK. Take time out, focus on what’s good, tell your mother you love her.”

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It’s not hard to imagine who else Kilner might want to tell she loves him if she could, but she seems determined to remember Truaxe full of fun and joy.

“In the early days when it was stressful it never felt it, he made every situation fun,” she says fondly, and tells me what they’d do if Truaxe was with her on this trip to Hong Kong. “He loved eating food! His favourite thing was French fries, Diet Coke and ketchup.”

She’s also sure that if he were here, he would have taught her daughter, Mila, all kinds of practical jokes, prankster that he was. “He was a big child at heart,” she says with a gentle smile.

“Brandon will always be the biggest part of our story,” Kilner says. “He was Deciem.”