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When Michelle Peluso took over as Revlon’s chief executive officer in late 2024, the 93-year-old beauty brand was reeling from a high-profile bankruptcy and years of stalled innovation. In 2023, it shed $2.7 billion in debt and went private, handing control of the company over to its lenders. In her first 12 months on the job, Peluso, a former CVS and IBM executive, worked to lay the groundwork for Revlon’s turnaround through what she calls Revlon’s “foundation for the future”: five strategic pillars designed to restore the company’s relevance in a fast-moving beauty landscape.
Those pillars — consumer obsession, innovation with scale, omnichannel excellence, talent elevation, and tech-driven modernization — now underpin everything from the brand’s product development to retail execution. “Every brand starts with understanding where the consumer is headed and what they want,” Peluso tells Vogue Business. “You can lose sight of that when there’s a lot going on internally. We’ve had to rebuild that muscle.”
Before Peluso’s arrival, Revlon had spent years struggling to keep pace with a beauty market reshaped by digital-first brands and shifting consumer habits. Heavy debt, supply chain issues and slow innovation cycles left it unable to invest in marketing or new product development (NPD), while younger competitors like Elf and Rare Beauty built loyal followings on social media Revlon was late to embrace. After filing for bankruptcy, the company needed a cultural and operational reset. With experience across retail, tech and consumer brands, Peluso was hired to modernize and restore one of beauty’s oldest names.
Rather than chasing the next viral startup, Peluso’s turnaround plan begins with heritage. “We’re so fortunate to have these incredibly beloved brands from generation to generation,” she says. Alongside its namesake Revlon lines (Color Cosmetics, Professional and Colorsilk), its portfolio includes Elizabeth Arden, Creme of Nature, CND, Cutex, Mitchum and the Juicy Couture fragrance line. “Our job is to bring that forward in modern and fresh ways.”
A brand-first plan
The clearest proof of concept has been Elizabeth Arden, which recently celebrated its 115th anniversary with an immersive pop-up in New York’s SoHo that reintroduced the ideas of its founder — beauty as science, wellness and empowerment — to a new audience. The same playbook has already paid off in China, where Elizabeth Arden has outpaced category growth for two consecutive years, per the brand, thanks to a digitally savvy team and ambassadors like actor Xin Zhilei. “They’ve made the brand younger, more fun and more relevant, while still rooted in its DNA,” Peluso says.
If Elizabeth Arden is the test case, Revlon Color Cosmetics is the emotional core of the revival. Once synonymous with glamor — think ’80s-era ads starring Cindy Crawford and Iman, accompanied by the tagline: “The most unforgettable women in the world wear Revlon” — the brand had diluted its identity chasing minimalism and “no-makeup makeup”.
Peluso wants to bring it back to color. “That trend is on its way out,” she says of the barely there looks and clean girl aesthetics that have graced social media feeds since the Covid pandemic. “Full-beat color and more transformational looks are on the rise. Revlon can’t and shouldn’t try to be the ‘no-makeup makeup’ brand — that’s not our heritage.”
To pinpoint where the brand should play, Peluso’s team built a proprietary global demand map for color cosmetics — an analytics model combining hundreds of behavioral and psychographic variables across regions to identify the largest and fastest-growing spaces for opportunity. One of those spaces, dubbed “E-glam”, represents consumers seeking “efficient glamour”: women who love color and sensorial texture but seek it in an accessible, time-saving format. This insight has become the backbone of Revlon’s NPD and storytelling roadmap. According to Revlon’s internal data, 57% of consumers now favor high-impact looks for events, suggesting that the long-dominant no-makeup trend may be giving way to bolder self-expression.
That shift can be seen through Revlon’s recent launches, including the Glimmer, Shimmer, Shine collection of light-reflecting lip products, as well as next spring’s PhotoReady foundation relaunch, inspired by the rise of tweakments and offering luminous finishes that evoke a selfie filter. “We’re getting bolder and bolder in our storytelling,” Peluso says. “It’s about building on the DNA of glamor in a way that feels current.”
Betting on fragrance
Peluso is betting on fragrance to help reignite growth. The category, which accounts for roughly a quarter of Revlon’s portfolio, is being rebuilt through partnerships with Palm Angels, Ice Spice, and, in 2027, a global fragrance debut with Champion. “The fastest-growing part of the fragrance category is young men in their teens through early 30s,” Peluso says. “Champion gives us a way to meet them where they are.” Legacy lines like Juicy Couture are also being reintroduced to Gen Z with campaigns starring basketball phenom Angel Reese and new scents like Just Moi, which Peluso says are gaining traction at both Ulta Beauty and Amazon.
Behind the scenes, Peluso is also reshaping how the company works — not just what it sells. She’s modernizing product lifecycle and planning systems to streamline data, deploying generative and agentic AI to speed formulation, packaging and creative development, while reducing the time from idea to shelf. She says Revlon’s late adoption of modern systems has, paradoxically, been an advantage: “Because we weren’t locked into legacy platforms, we can move straight to the newest technologies and leapfrog a few steps ahead.”
The company’s tech overhaul has coincided with a cultural one. Peluso has brought in former Estée Lauder executive Amber Garrison to lead Elizabeth Arden and fragrance, ex-Starbucks International digital head Ralph Marshall as chief tech officer, and Philips alum Dana Medema as president of North America.
The results are early but encouraging. Sales across color, hair and skincare are trending upward, according to the brand, with Revlon Color Cosmetics, American Crew, Creme of Nature and Elizabeth Arden Asia each standing out. “We’re private now, so we don’t give numbers,” Peluso says, “but the momentum is real.”
If there’s one theme running through Peluso’s first year, it’s humility. “We’re staying humble — we don’t have all the answers yet, and we know this is a long journey,” she says. “But our sleeves are rolled up.” After a decade defined by debt, disruption and doubt, Revlon’s revival rests on a simple idea: that modern beauty still has room for old-school glamor, as long as you can make it feel new again.
