Top 20 influencers: the brightest big bosses in the business

Behind every great design company is an equally – if not greater – business mind. As part of our Power 200 list of the globe's pre-eminent design talent – a doubling of our Power 100 list, devised as part of our celebratory 200th issue of Wallpaper* – we've collated a list of the brightest big bosses in the business; the men and women who match vision with strategic smarts, and manufacturing and design innovation with a confidence that quality will, eventually, win out.

On one side, we have those eponymous heads of totemic and established companies at the top of their games: such titans as Carlo Molteni and Alberto Alessi, Michael Maharam, Rolf and Mette Hay, Roberto and Renato Minotti, and Nadja Swarovski, the latter of whom has transformed a twee brand into a dazzling design patron.

On the other, the power CEOs revitalising and pushing existing brands to the peak of their powers: Claudio Luti at Kartell, Kvadrat's Anders Byriel, Georg Jensen's David Chu, Restoration Hardware moderniser Gary Friedman, Marianne Goebl at the Vitra-owned Artek, ClassiCon's Oliver Holy and Vitra's own co-CEO Nora Feldbaum.

In between – though no less significant – are other tactical mega-minds such as Vipp’s CEO and chief designer Kasper Egelund and Morten Bo Jensen (respectively), Flos' lighting maven Piero Gandini, SCP founder Sheridan Coakley, Emeco-embellisher Gregg Buchbinder, B&B Italia CEO Giorgio Busnelli and the sharply intuitive Patrizia Moroso.

It's hard to underestimate the significance of our chosen 20 – the individuals with our contemporary design identity in their hands, and the facilitators pushing the world's brightest design talents to stratospheric new heights.

See the Power 200 in full here 

Sheridan Coakley: Founder of SCP, which turned 30 this year. Pictured: Top left, Matthew Hilton, the late James Irvine, Michael Marriott, Sheridan Coakley, Terence Woodgate, Jasper Morrison and Konstantin Grcic, shot at the company’s Milan debut in 1996, more than a decade after SCP was founded. Beneath, the same group today, with designer Marialaura Rossiello Irvine standing in for her late husband, James, and Grcic, who couldn’t make the shoot but sent us a life-sized paper cut-out instead. As featured in W*194.

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See the Power 200 in full