Elisa Fischer has been appointed global CEO of KEVIN.MURPHY, the Australian professional hair-care brand, succeeding interim CEO Steven Leighton. Fischer will lead the business across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific as the company looks to accelerate international growth. BehindTheChair reported the appointment and Fischer’s career path, while Global Cosmetics News described the expansion mandate.
Fischer joins from Luxury Brand Partners, where she was senior vice president of R+Color and managing director of IGK. She previously led the Americas and Asia-Pacific business for TIGI at Unilever and held leadership roles across L’Oréal Professionnel, Matrix, Redken and Pureology. The appointment gives KEVIN.MURPHY a leader whose career has moved between professional salons, retail and direct-to-consumer channels.
Keeping the salon at the centre
The mandate is international, but the operating detail is local: deepen relationships with distributors and the salon network while expanding into key hair-care markets. KEVIN.MURPHY was founded in Melbourne in 2004 and is distributed in about 60 countries, so Fischer’s brief is to widen reach without losing the professional channel that built the brand.
The company’s choice also follows a period under interim leadership. Fischer’s task is not simply to add markets; it is to make the brand’s creative and sustainability-focused identity travel consistently through different distributor structures and salon communities. That makes the appointment a people-and-platform story as much as a geographic one.
The move sits beside Jil Sander’s appointment of Marco Viganò as CEO, another leadership change in a global brand where customer relationships and international execution are central to the mandate. For KEVIN.MURPHY, Fischer’s early work will be visible in how the company supports stylists while turning a distributed network into a more coherent global business.
There is a human side to that operating brief. Professional beauty brands grow through trust between the company, distributors, salon owners and stylists; a global CEO has to scale the system without making those relationships feel distant. Fischer’s experience across education, professional channels and consumer businesses gives her a vocabulary for that work. The appointment is a reminder that international expansion is often won in the routines of local partners, not just in the map of markets a company enters.
