Ashley McDonnell
You have to hand it to Ashley McDonnell – she certainly knows how to put a positive spin on things. Having spent the past five years bigging up her role in PUIG, a group that owns and operates luxury fashion and beauty brands, the Galway woman has now parted ways with the Spanish company. With characteristic bombast, the 32-year-old managed to turn returning from living la belle vie in the brand’s office in Paris into a promotional opportunity. As she announced her departure, she gave a juicy plug to the pricey apartment complex in Blackrock that is now her base – and for which she is a brand ambassador.
“It’s hard to believe after 12 years of working in the industry, I’m taking a step back to take a step forward,” she announced on Instagram, adding that the partnership with the apartment complex “couldn’t have come at a better moment”.
Naturally, McDonnell “can’t wait to share more about what I’m working on” but has so far only revealed that she is moving forward as an entrepreneur and “building my own businesses”.
Represented by Align The Agency, who always describes her as “our very own ‘Emily in Paris’” and will presumably have to coin a new moniker, Ashley is an enthusiastic self-promoter. Her Instagram content is a dizzying round of plugs for the brands she collaborates with, shots of herself in the glam locations and promoting the designer outfits she wears.
Press releases were sent out when McDonnell reached the base camp of Mount Everest in 2023, accompanied by a nice plug for travel company Intrepid. The release described how ahead of her ascent, she “went on a quest for a blow-dry” in Nepal’s Namche Bazaar, “ensuring even Everest is done in style”.
It’s probably no surprise that McDonnell demonstrates a flair for the art of waffle. She was global consumer acceleration director – or in simpler terms, tasked with growing the customer base – at PUIG (pronounced Poosh), which confusingly markets itself as the “home of Love Brands within a family company, that furthers wellness, confidence and self-expression while leaving a better world”.
Readers of Ashley’s LinkedIn page would surely have been impressed to see that she was “Director at PUIG”, inadvertently indicating boardroom status. Her profile also refers to her Harvard University Entrepreneurship Essentials. This would be the four-week course of “6-8 hours per week” advertised by Harvard.
From Craughwell in Galway, McDonnell made quite the poosh to develop her luxury, jetsetter lifestyle. She completed dual degrees and masters programmes with Irish and French colleges, followed by a six-month internship as a data analyst with luxury goods group LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy). This led to stints as digital manager for the travel retail division of Dior and luxury account manager at Google. She was also chairperson of Digital Business Ireland from 2021 to 2024.
She has boasted that her long-term goal is to build the LVMH of Ireland. “I also want to build new brands with Ireland at their core,” she said in an interview with her alma mater, UCD. “Everything I’m doing now is simply to learn and to get ready for that.”
McDonnell can talk the talk but the jury is out on whether the events the Duchess of Spin puts together live up to the hype.
Take the inaugural Ireland Fashion Week, which McDonnell launched last month. It was promoted as “marking a culturally defining moment for Irish fashion” and included “seven shows, intimate supper series, collaborative community events, and high-energy afterparties”.
McDonnell triumphantly announced that it had attracted €1m in industry support, a €7.5m tech fund for participating designers and would showcase “the best of Irish talent across fashion, design, music, film and beyond”. The main sponsor was Visa, with other partnerships such as SOSU Cosmetics, L’Oréal Professionnel, Meaghers Pharmacy, The Dean Group, Kildare Village, Primark, M&S, Avoca and Specsavers.
Despite the hyperbole, the week-long event doesn’t appear to have received significant attention. While the launch was faithfully covered in advance by some of the Irish media, particularly “churnalism” hacks who are always eager to fill online spaces, the actual events themselves barely made a ripple.
Not content with keeping her knowledge to herself, the indefatigable McDonnell started teaching and guest lecturing at NEOMA Business School and HEC Paris “in order to have more impact”.
She declared herself “most proud of” launching a podcast in 2022, Tech Powered Luxury, “democratising the key information people need to pursue a successful career at the crossover of tech and luxury through a podcast that’s free for all to listen to”.
It features our heroine interviewing an eclectic set of people but it’s hard to know who exactly it’s aimed at. Listeners were told they’d be “captivated, inspired and enlightened” as the podcast would take them “on a journey through the minds of industry giants”. Interviewees thus far would be unfamiliar to the average Irish listener, such as entrepreneur Ashley Dudarenok, who “lives and breeds [sic] the Chinese digital ecosystem”, and Haneen Al Saify, a “custodian of beauty for Qatari women”.
They have also included local gals, who would be pretty much unknown outside Ireland – and barely known within it – including Sindo beauty writer Triona McCarthy, social media influencer Lauren Arthurs and former Xpóse presenter Lorraine Keane. The latter described Paul Newman driving her around a racecourse in a Porsche and doing the foxtrot with Bono in New York. Quite how these anecdotes align with the podcast’s remit of guests sharing their “unique perspective on the fusion of luxury and technology” was never explained.
Brands that have coughed up to sponsor the podcast get a whirl too, so Seabody’s Helena McMahon, Seoulista Beauty’s Una McGurk and Shannon McLinden of FarmHouse Fresh each had an episode to plug their wares.
Tech Powered Luxury held an event at the Irish embassy during Paris Fashion Week last month, with support from Enterprise Ireland. This was a similar event last year and both featured runway shows, live podcasts and music performances. An event this year at the Irish ambassador’s residence in Abu Dhabi was attended by luminaries such as, er, Keane and McCarthy.
While she has been working for other companies thus far, McDonnell launched Clover & Sea Ltd in 2022. Little is known about it but its principal activity is listed under the category of “manufacture of perfumes and toilet preparations”. Alas, accounts filed earlier this year show that the company had not-so-glamorous accumulated losses of €16,000 at the end of July 2024.
McDonnell’s PR firm has described her as “spending years building bridges between Ireland’s creative talent and the world’s biggest fashion players”. Whether her aim of connecting Irish talent with the international fashion industry comes to pass with any real substance remains to be seen but, whatever transpires, the ambitious Ash will undoubtedly rise like a phoenix to unveil her next move with a suitably hyperbolic flourish.
