“I created a tailor-made job for myself”

La Croix L’Hebdo: What gets you up in the morning?

Veronique Debroise: I get up early. I can’t get up late, because I manage two companies that fully mobilize me. But it’s in the evening, around 6 p.m., that my real day begins, my day as an artist, my moment of creation. I go into the lab and use my senses. Colors, smells, touch. I seek to make a sensory experience accessible to children. When I manage to develop an easy and fun process, I know that my work has achieved its goal. All that’s left is to produce the game. Which means many more weeks of work.

At work, how is it going?

V. D. : For me, working is a game! I come from perfumery and I make olfactory games, isn’t that lucky? I created a tailor-made position for myself. I am also said to be a perfectionist. I rather believe that I am in search of perfection. Above all, I have several jobs. When I was 28, I created my own company to launch Le Loto des odors and other olfactory games.

But very quickly, realizing that there was a problem of education of all the senses, I created other games, including one on color, Aquarellum (painting game for children, editor’s note). The range requiring many drawings, we have created an integrated design studio. As the company has grown, I try to meet the teams in the morning, and in the afternoon I work on the legal files, which are numerous and complex. In short, I go from rooster to donkey. My day is like a picture of one of our puzzles: pointillist.

Who do you trust?

V. D. : I have confidence in the technique and the technicians. I like people who know how. I don’t listen to people who have great ideas and then ask others to put them into practice. An idea, either it is practicable or it is useless. I have admiration for artists, because they give substance to their feelings. I am enthusiastic ; I trust the human being and, it is true, sometimes I am disappointed. But for the management, I am very careful. I have always managed by telling myself: I have to get out of it if the earth stops turning. And that’s what I experienced with the Covid.

A scene that marked you recently?

V. D. : At the moment, it’s very hard not to be marked by the absurdity of war and destruction. I don’t want to forget it, even if my daily life is far from all that. Moreover, what touches me is to receive personal letters.

I remember an unsolicited application received when we were looking for a motto for the company. We had to find a unity because, after smell and sight, I had widened the field of the senses to hearing, around a play on music. This person wrote to me: “I became a painter because when I was little I played Aquarellum”. I said to myself that our job was to be a “creator of vocations”. This formula did not arouse the enthusiasm of my collaborators, but it is nevertheless what I chose, because that is what we do.

Right now, what would change your life?

V. D. : We work at the crossroads of three regulatory regimes: household chemicals, which can be made into cosmetics, for use by children. Remove me this pile and my life is no longer the same. Or, a European standard has appeared which requires that there is no more than 10% air in packaging. However, we manufacture puzzles whose 1,000 pieces in bags take up infinitely more volume than the puzzle itself. Even by compacting them, there is at least 70% air in a box. Trust me to do beautiful, efficient and environmentally friendly things!

And for tomorrow, an idea to change the world?

V. D. : A little pill to prevent jealousy, a source of wickedness and… industrial copying! Above all, I would like us to develop sensory education for children. Learning to juxtapose colors, to even create them, is as important as knowing how to count. It’s not just intelligence. The intuitive, the instinctive make it possible to understand things half-wordly, by harmony. There are other teaching aids than books: a painting, a smell, contact with the skin. “Perfumes, colors and sounds respond to each other”, says Baudelaire.

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It would take a whole palette of colors and scents from France, Brazil, Costa Rica and Morocco, where she lived as a child, to describe Véronique Debroise, 62, married and mother of a daughter. Self-taught, she knows how to be icy in her management of technical or strategic files and fire in her favorites and her creativity. The one who, at the age of 7, received as a prize from the King of Morocco a large box of pencils with which she made her first creations of make-up and sand painting, today manages two companies of sensory games and cardboard, in straddling the Paris region and the Drôme. In 1988, the Marcel-Bleustein-Blanchet Vocation Foundation prize rewarded his original desire to develop the learning of the senses. A will that remained intact.

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