Renée Puissant, born Rachel Van Cleef in 1898, was the daughter of Alfred Van Cleef and Estelle Arpels, whose marriage had brought together the two families behind the house founded on the place Vendôme in 1906.
In 1926 she became the house's artistic director. Her meeting with René Sim Lacaze, a designer who had worked with Van Cleef & Arpels since 1923, began one of the most fruitful creative partnerships in its history: Lacaze turned her bold ideas into sketches, often annotated in her own hand, and together they shaped the house's distinctive style through the late Art Deco years.
In 1933 Van Cleef & Arpels patented its Mystery Set (Serti Mystérieux), in which rubies, sapphires or emeralds are set with no visible metal prongs, and which became the emblem of its craftsmanship; a single clip can need more than 300 hours of work. The years that followed brought the Ludo bracelet, first with a brick-link mesh and then with hexagonal links, the Minaudière vanity case, the Pivoine clip of 1937, and the Passe-Partout, a transformable necklace patented in 1938 whose detachable clips can be worn many ways. The collaboration with Lacaze continued until 1939.
From 1937 she was a partner with her cousins Jacques, Claude and Pierre Arpels, and after her father's death in 1938 she ran the house. When the Arpels family left for the United States during the Second World War she stayed in France, in Vichy, where she died in 1942.
Van Cleef & Arpels dates the Puissant and Lacaze collaboration to 1939, while other sources give about twenty years. Her birth year (1898) comes from secondary sources.