Galway's real-life Emil... - Financial Unions

How does someone soar from Business and French in DCU, to LMVH – the luxury goods giant that owns Dior – at 22, Google at 25 and now Puig, the luxury fashion and fragrance company that represents brands like Paco Rabane, Carolina Herrera, and most recently Charlotte Tilbury, all before they're 30?

"You could call it pure chance, but it was basically just, I just didn't give up", Ashley McDonnell tells me over the phone. "I know a lot of people probably looked at my career path and might think that I have connections, have a great network. Not at all. Like, I grew up in the countryside in Galway and I just was persistent and kept going."

At just 30, McDonnell has already reached heights some of us wouldn't even dream of. A technologist who focuses on the intersection between high fashion and technology, McDonnell has become a lecturer as well as a spokesperson for her corner of the business world.

In 2022, she was named the chairperson for Digital Business Ireland, the representative body for online business, picking up the mantel from Gym+Coffee CEO Niall Horgan. She followed in his footsteps, after he raised €20 million in revenue and brought the body's membership up to 8,000.

Now, she's the director of consumer engagement with Puig, the group behind luxury brands such as Rabanne, Jean Paul Gaultier, Charlotte Tilbury and more. She also hosts the chart-topping podcast Tech Powered Luxury, where she interviews leaders in the fields of fashion, tech and more and shares their insights.

One question: how? We caught up with McDonnell, now based once again in Paris, to hear all about her career journey.

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Getting started

McDonnell knew she wanted to work in fashion from a young age, eventually studying a double major in Business and French between DCU in Dublin and France, before getting her Masters and a slew of internships in LVMH among others.

Five years ago, we might have called McDonnell a "girlboss", a term that has evolved from an aspiration to an insult, depending on who you're talking to.

McDonnell has no interest in, as they say on TikTok, "girlbossing, gaslighting, gatekeeping". She's incredibly transparent about her career journey so far.

Arriving in France – fluent in the language, unlike Emily in Netflix's Emily in Paris – she had no connections. She says she "definitely wasn't getting my dream internships", but treated each one like "an interview". She found herself taking the internships her French classmates didn't want, but "it made me work ten times harder".

"When I finally got my first internship at LVMH. I did not want to leave there without an offer within the group because I knew that was my one chance."

Younger than her interns

Before long, she was a data analyst for LVMH, then Global Luxury Account Manager with Google and now, a director at Puig.

A lot of it was pure, dogged knocking on doors. "Luckily I don't get embarrassed, but with Google, I'm almost embarrassed because I was applying for jobs at Google for 10 years, [from] when I was 16", she laughs. "The only reason I think that they finally accepted me was because... I asked five people to refer me at the same time. And I don't think that would be the common practise of Google."

Being in such positions would be undoubtedly motivating, but surely competitive, too, and for McDonnell, being a young leader in a powerhouse company turned heads. "It was quite difficult because I would constantly be asked, how old are you? Just because I probably look older than I am", she says.

"In the first year when I started at Dior, I was a manager and I was only 22. I think people thought I was more like 30." Once co-workers realised her true age, "that could make things a little bit competitive".

"My interns were always older than me, were quite a few years older than me, actually, because the education system in France really encourages you to study for longer and to do more internships, whereas in Ireland things are quite fast tracked."

Despite working in a field that traditionally caters to women, McDonnell says it is still largely dominated with men.

"In terms of women in positions of leadership, that was definitely a challenge", she says. "If you look at all the top luxury brands today, even the ones that are primarily catered to female clients, generally, the CEOs are going to be men. That's a generational gap that will take a little bit longer, because if we look at women today that are in their 60s or even 50s, they did not have the support back then to continue their careers."

If you're like me, you're wondering how McDonnell keeps from screaming into her pillow with stress. The answer is, of course, manifesting – though she doesn't call it that.

"I call it planning. I completely believe in it. I know if I make the plan, it's going to happen. I'm very much someone that sets goals multiple times a year and every single day." Her journal of choice is none other than Irish brand The Head Plan: "I've gone through a few of them at this stage."

Ashley lecturing at ESSEC Paris Luxury MBA. Photo: Ashley McDonnell

Mentors and motivations

This habit she picked up from her years of athletics training with Craughwell AC, under the coaching of Michael Toibin, who she still names as one of her biggest motivators. Business, she finds, is a lot like athletics. "It's like looking at your indoor season, your outdoor season, but here it's like H1 and H2 in the business environment and figuring out what is that I want to achieve."

"You can really achieve anything that you want to. You just have to really want to be able to do it and break it down into smaller goals. And there's nothing yet so far, at least in the roles I've had, that I haven't been able to achieve."

"I'm a big fan of everything to do with Think and Grow Rich [by Napoleon Hill]", she adds, "which is an incredible book about how your mindset basically is the only thing that can stop you. So if you can really give yourself the space and the room to figure out what it is that you want to do in life, that you can go and do it."

She also works with an executive coach, who helps her set goals, and draws inspiration from her "family of entrepreneurs", as her mother had her own business career in London and New York.

So after 10 years in business already, what would her advice to aspiring women in business?

"It would be 'know your values'. As you become more and more senior in the business world and the business environment, you're going to be faced with harder decisions every day and it's so important to know who you are, what your values are. You need to be the person in the room that says that's not okay, let's not do it that way. There's a better way we can do this."

To follow Ashley's journey, follow her on Instagram.

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