CorpDigest
Revlon, Inc.
Leadership History
5 leaders · Full leadership timeline
Last reviewed: 2025-06-09 · By Swet Parvadiya
Revlon's June 2022 Chapter 11 filing listed $5.4 billion in debt against a beauty company generating $2.98 billion in annual revenue. The debt did not come from product failure or brand obsolescence — it came from Ronald Perelman's 1985 leveraged buyout, which loaded a healthy company with acquisition financing, and from thirty-five subsequent years of financial decisions that never fully resolved the original capital structure problem. When Revlon emerged from bankruptcy in May 2023 as a private entity, it had eliminated $2.7 billion in liabilities — the largest single financial event in the company's 91-year history. The company that emerged operates differently from the one that filed. It owns a portfolio of heritage brands including the Revlon flagship, Elizabeth Arden, Almay, and Cutex, spanning color cosmetics, skincare, fragrances, and professional beauty tools. The 2016 Elizabeth Arden acquisition for approximately $870 million added the professional channel and the Eight Hour Cream legacy to the brand portfolio, but it also added more debt to a balance sheet that was already structurally fragile. The 2013 Colomer Group acquisition had done the same in the professional beauty segment thirteen years earlier. CEO Michelle Peluso, appointed in November 2024, inherits a company with no public market obligations, no bondholders to appease, and a brand portfolio whose cultural equity remains intact even as the financial engineering that nearly destroyed it has been unwound. The competitive landscape she faces is defined by e.l.f. Beauty's $7 retail price point and 37 percent gross margins, and by TikTok-native brands that can sell out a product launch before Revlon's traditional 12-to-18-month development cycle can respond. The FY2022 net sales of $2.98 billion represented a 4.7 percent decline from the prior year. The fourth quarter alone fell 4.1 percent to $589.8 million. Those are not catastrophic numbers for a company in bankruptcy — they suggest the brands still had commercial value — but they demonstrate that the customer erosion was real and operating through the bankruptcy period rather than reversing because of it.
Chief Executive Officer
Michelle Peluso was appointed CEO on November 4, 2024, bringing deep expertise in digital transformation and supply chain logistics from her previous roles at CVS Health and Walmart. She is executing a aggressive turnaround strategy focused on accelerating product innovation velocity, modernizing the global supply chain, and expanding digital direct-to-consumer capabilities to reclaim market share lost to digitally-native competitors.
Interim Chief Executive Officer
Liz Smith served as interim CEO during the critical post-bankruptcy transition period, guiding the company through its emergence from Chapter 11 in May 2023 and stabilizing operations while the new private ownership group searched for a permanent CEO. Her leadership provided the necessary continuity to maintain retailer relationships and manage the complex restructuring process.
Chairman and CEO
Ronald Perelman took Revlon private in a $5.3 billion leveraged buyout in 1985, loading the company with massive debt that constrained its ability to invest in innovation for decades. While he successfully stabilized the company’s financial position in the short term, his financial engineering ultimately led to the company’s long-term decline and eventual bankruptcy filing in 2022.
Chief Financial Officer
David Kennedy served as CFO during the company’s descent into bankruptcy, managing the complex capital structure and negotiating with lenders during the Chapter 11 restructuring process. He played a critical role in the successful elimination of $2.7 billion in debt and the company’s emergence as a private entity in May 2023.
Founder and President
Charles Revson was the primary driving force behind Revlon’s early success, pioneering the concept of matching pigmented nail enamel and lipstick and establishing the brand’s aspirational image through glamorous advertising campaigns. His ruthless marketing vision and aggressive business tactics established Revlon as the dominant force in the American color cosmetics market for over four decades.
Inflationary pressures on raw materials, particularly petroleum-based chemicals, packaging resins, and global freight costs, continue to compress gross margins across both segments, forcing Revlon to implement price increases that risk further alienating its value-conscious mass-market consumer base. However, Revlon's future is fraught with significant risks, including the continued erosion of its mass-market share, the potential for further inflationary pressure on raw material costs, and the immense challenge of retaining key executive talent in a highly competitive labor market for beauty industry professionals.
Revlon's leadership history begins with Charles Revson, who served as President and CEO from founding in 1932 until his death in August 1975. Michel Bergerac, a French-American executive who had previously run ITT's European operations, succeeded Revson and led Revlon through the late 1970s and into the early 1980s before resisting Ronald Perelman's 1985 hostile takeover and departing after the leveraged buyout closed. Under Perelman's MacAndrews & Forbes ownership, a series of CEOs led the company across nearly four decades, including George Fellows, Jorge Casado, Jack Stahl, Alan Ennis, Lorenzo Delpani, Fabian Garcia, Paul Meister (as interim CEO), and Debra Perelman (Ronald Perelman's daughter), who served as CEO from 2018 through the June 2022 Chapter 11 filing. Liz Smith, a longtime consumer-products executive who had previously served as CEO of Bloomin' Brands and as a senior executive at Avon, served as Interim CEO from 2023 to early 2024, guiding the company through the Chapter 11 emergence. Michelle Peluso, a former Citigroup, IBM, and Travelocity executive, succeeded Smith as CEO in early 2024 to lead the rebuild phase of the post-Chapter 11 turnaround.
Michelle Peluso became Chief Executive Officer of Revlon in early 2024, taking over from Interim CEO Liz Smith and inheriting a company that had emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May 2023 with reduced debt of approximately $1.4 billion and a new owner group led by former bondholders. Peluso's background spans consumer technology, marketing, and travel, with senior roles including Chief Customer Officer at IBM, CEO of Travelocity and later Gilt Groupe, and Chief Marketing Officer at Citigroup. Her mandate at Revlon is to rebuild the brand's category position after years of operational disruption and share losses, restore retail shelf presence at mass-market accounts (Walmart, Target, CVS, Walgreens, and supermarket beauty aisles), refresh product innovation across the Revlon, Elizabeth Arden, and Almay brands, and modernize the digital and direct-to-consumer infrastructure that had lagged competitors. The company's revenue stabilization in the roughly $1.8 to $2 billion range through 2024 represents an early stage of the turnaround, with the multi-year question being whether structural category share losses to L'Oréal, e.l.f. Beauty, and direct-to-consumer indie brands can be reversed or merely arrested under her leadership.
Debra Perelman, the daughter of Revlon's long-time controlling shareholder Ronald Perelman, served as Chief Executive Officer of Revlon from June 2018 through the June 2022 Chapter 11 filing and into the early bankruptcy proceedings. Her appointment, which made her one of the few daughters to succeed a father at a major US public company, was preceded by senior roles in Revlon's strategic-planning and digital functions and brief tenure at MacAndrews & Forbes, the family holding company. Her tenure was defined by the operational challenges that ultimately led to bankruptcy: supply-chain disruption through 2021 and into 2022 that impaired retail order fulfillment, intensifying competition from L'Oréal, e.l.f. Beauty, and indie direct-to-consumer brands, the residual financial strain from the 2020 Citigroup wire-transfer episode in which approximately $900 million was mistakenly wired to Revlon lenders, and the burden of approximately $3.7 billion of accumulated debt. The June 2022 Chapter 11 filing ended the Perelman family's nearly four-decade control of the company, and Debra Perelman departed the CEO role and the board as part of the May 2023 plan of reorganization, with Liz Smith named Interim CEO.
Ronald Perelman, through his holding company MacAndrews & Forbes, controlled Revlon from the November 1985 hostile leveraged buyout through the June 2022 Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, a 37-year tenure that made him one of the longest-serving corporate principals in modern US business history. As Chairman and frequently the de facto strategic decision-maker behind multiple appointed CEOs, Perelman directed major transactions including the 1987 acquisition of Almay, the 2013 acquisition of The Colomer Group for $660 million, and the 2016 acquisition of Elizabeth Arden for $870 million. He took the company public again in 1996, repurchased shares at various points, and used Revlon as both a strategic platform and a source of management fees and dividends to MacAndrews & Forbes. The cumulative leverage accumulated across these decades, combined with operational challenges in the late 2010s and early 2020s, produced the $3.7 billion debt load that forced the 2022 Chapter 11 filing. The plan of reorganization wiped out substantially all of MacAndrews & Forbes's equity in the reorganized company, ending Perelman's Revlon chapter. Perelman remains one of the most prominent post-1980s American leveraged-buyout principals.