It’s the pure life only from now on for Revlon’s former Irish boss

Alan Ennis is now head of a beauty products brand manager and consultancy in New York

Alan Ennis:  a fixture among the Irish-American movers and shakers of New York. Photograph: Cyril Byrne/The Irish Times
Alan Ennis: a fixture among the Irish-American movers and shakers of New York. Photograph: Cyril Byrne/The Irish Times

Alan Ennis, the Dublin-born, New York-based former chief executive of cosmetics giant Revlon, has popped up at an intriguing-sounding new company in the Big Apple. Ennis is now president and chief executive of Glansaol, which appears to be a beauty products brand manager and consultancy.

Anyone who has lived in the US will tell you that the natives there aren't great when it comes to pronouncing foreign words. I was always a disaster at the cúpla focal myself, but the website for Ennis's new company helpfully points out that it is pronounced "Glan Sale which means the Pure Life" in Irish.

Ennis has brought on board one of his former colleagues from Revlon, Martine Williamson, to run the sales side of things. From the description on its website, Glansaol will advise beauty product brand-owners and band them together in portfolios to give them clout with retailers and help cut costs.

Ennis, a UCD and Arthur Andersen-trained accountant, was chief executive of the $1.5 billion-a-year Revlon for more than four years until he left in late 2013.

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He previously worked at Ingersoll Rand, with whom he moved to the US at the turn of the millennium. Since then, he has become a fixture among the Irish-American movers and shakers of New York.

Earlier this year, UCD and the Irish International Business Network put on an alumni networking event, An Evening With Alan Ennis, at New York's Mutual of America Building on plush Park Avenue.

You know you’ve really made it when you get to headline “An evening with . . . ” gigs.

He has also served for the past year on the board of a Texan sports nutrition company, Nutrabolt, so Ennis certainly hasn't been letting the grass grow under his feet since leaving Revlon, which appears to have gone through more managers in the last decade than Chelsea under Roman Abramovich.