3. Patricia Turck Paquelier

By Lauren Goldstein

Launching a fragrance may seem simple: design a bottle, fill it with juice, paper the planet with ads. But if you listen to Patricia Turck Paquelier, below, head of the Prestige and Collections International division of L'Oreal in Paris, tell it, creating a fragrance to match the carefully crafted images of designers like Giorgio Armani and Viktor & Rolf is no easy task. After all, designers make clothes for the select few, but a perfume has to appeal to the masses, not to mention the egos of the designers involved.

"We leverage their image in a tremendous way," Turck Paquelier says. "They love it, but they also hate it." Designers love seeing their names spread around the world, but they hate the idea that they must water down their image to appeal to a broader audience. Her challenge is to create products that make the designers proud and make consumers want to buy.

Turck Paquelier is one of the few senior executives L'Oreal has hired from the outside. After 13 years at Procter & Gamble and five at Yves Saint Laurent Parfums, she was chosen by L'Oreal to balance the needs of designers and of L'Oreal chairman and CEO Lindsay Owen-Jones. In Turck Paquelier's first six years at the company, she tripled L'Oreal's Armani business. By 2002, the brand was bringing in about $429 million a year in sales.

These are the kind of numbers that get Turck Paquelier's juices flowing. "I am only interested in big things. Not small things. Not niche brands," she says. Which is strange, because it was Turck Paquelier's decision to sign up the small Dutch fashion house of Viktor & Rolf. "They want to be famous," she insists. Certainly a fragrance backed by L'Oreal will help in that regard. But what's in it for L'Oreal? Turck Paquelier and Owen-Jones hope that the Dutch duo will attract inventive managers and researchers to the company. They also want the designers to keep them on their toes. "We like that they are creative and innovative," Turck Paquelier says. "It forces us to create fragrances that are nonconventional." --By Lauren Goldstein