Helping an “Abnormal” Company Share its Story

One visit to the Deciem website will tell you they’re a very abnormal beauty company, a label they wear with the appropriate amount of pride. Founded in 2013 as a startup by three friends, Deciem is the disruptor to the beauty industry that a lot of customers weren’t aware they were waiting for. They’re a company animated by a dedication to creating a brand that puts their customers’ needs first and creating and distributing their products in a manner that’s sustainable and focused on people over profits.

Deciem is a beauty company with clear brand values to Be True, Be Good, and Be Sustainable. With those goals in mind, they were able to build out their entire tech stack in-house. As is the case with many proprietary systems built out over the course of years, there came a time when their platform no longer met the needs of their employees or customers. Additionally, Deciem’s growth plans would have been difficult to meet with their proprietary tech stack in place. As such, they reached out to Valtech for a digital transformation and got so much more.

When Deciem founder Brandon Truaxe saw the lack of passion and transparency when beauty products were being developed, he decided to become the disruption the industry needed. But a desire to start a beauty products company doesn’t automatically translate to knowledge of the many needs for a successful and scalable e-commerce platform.

When companies with expertise in their products and services try to build their own digital platforms from scratch, they often build pieces over time to address the immediate need in front of them. By its very nature, this leads to solutions and platforms that struggle with scaling for the future and updating to meet evolving customer expectations.

As mentioned, Deciem’s core values are Be True, Be Good, and Be Sustainable. For them, it’s not just a slogan but a strong guiding principle in all that they do. As a purpose-led organization, it’s crucial that their business decisions reflect that purpose. Their goal is to create quality, sustainable skincare products at an affordable price. Their ideal customer is knowledgeable about skincare, cares deeply about their personalized skincare routine, and is conscious of the importance of humane and sustainable product creation and testing. To meet those needs, they have a very small marketing budget intended to keep those costs from being passed on to the customer, and they use an influencer-first marketing model. 

Collectively, this meant that Deciem had a very human-centered story that would inevitably resonate with their customers, but they needed an effective way to get that story told. Their original tech stack wasn’t aligned with contemporary best practices. With Valtech’s partnership, part of the goal was to transition their digital presence to make use of best practices in order to better allow their natural story to shine and attract the customers they wanted.

Most of Valtech’s partnerships go beyond what we build for our clients. Having a strong digital partner means having someone in your corner to help guide you on the tough decisions. In order to ensure Deciem had everything they needed to maintain their new composable web stack, we taught them the basics of running their site through Salesforce and the other programs we integrated.

In addition to overseeing their Salesforce migration and building the Regimen Builder, our partnership with Deciem included important moments of teaching them about web best practices and running Agile sprints. This way, they’re prepared to meet future challenges and even implement changes without Valtech input or oversight when needed.

Our work with Deciem was a Salesforce migration project that updated the functionality of their e-commerce site as well as improved the overall design and UX of each of their brand sites. Additionally, we provided a digital transformation that taught them the best practices and processes they should be using while collaborating with them to build something that would showcase the brand in the optimum manner without compromising a consumer journey. And we trained their dev teams on how to do the day-to-day maintenance on Salesforce.

As a result, Deciem now has a Regimen Builder functionality that leads to a deeper understanding of their products for the customer as well as ease of use. Their site is now fully mobile-friendly and capable of making changes at scale. Plus, their organization is now ready to run projects in an Agile manner. Valtech completed this project in nine months! That’s the benefit of working agile with a good partner, and those are the kind of results we’re excited to continue bringing to Deciem, and our other clients, in the future.