Bud Konheim, ceo, Nicole Miller

"The bottom line is this business is a commercial art, not a fine art. If you have a designer without a ceo, you have a fine art. If you have a ceo without a designer, you just have a commodity, and you won't thrive for long.

"Without great design, you can be the biggest ceo in the world and everything can be a joke," Konheim said. "If the designer is able to make all this great product without a ceo, then you don't need a ceo. But the really good designers are prolific and creative, and they all need an alter ego they can throw ideas against. Someone has to boil it down to what we are going to make a living on."

Konheim has been that person at Nicole Miller for more than two decades.

"Nicole and my partnership is based on a couple of philosophical tenants I laid down at the beginning: The business is going to be called Nicole Miller, the muse you are going to design things for is you and I am confident there are enough people who share your aesthetic to make a business. I've tried to manage her best design efforts, without wrecking it by saying we are having such a great season with all this stuff, don't make any new things. New innovations aren't big sellers out of the box, but you have to get them out there."

Elaine Hughes, president, executive search firm E.A. Hughes & Co.

"In hiring for any company when the designer is an active participant in the business, you have to understand how the designer thinks and then you look for complementary skill sets. In a designer-driven company, designers need to be partnered with someone to hold them accountable, and you look for someone financially sound with a success record. Some designers like [Lauren] think like a businessperson, and he directly recruited Roger Farah, who had the retail experience and was an excellent complement."

Allan Ellinger, senior managing director, Marketing Management Group

He argues that a third person is equally important: the head of merchandising. "A classically organized apparel company is like a seesaw with the ceo on one side and the designer on the other — and you need the merchant in the middle to create the balance. That person really has to marry the commerciality of the product to the design through helping plan what the collections will look like, edit the line and make sure the collection meets the price points required by the company."