Now that Jennifer Croll is getting national props for her retail vision, we wish we could say we knew her when. The fact is, Croll opened her first boutique in California — but don't blame us for boasting that she soon found a better shopping mecca in Scottsdale. Today, Croll's six-boutique empire is based in the Valley of the Sun, and she's not only leading The Mix, the giant new, Fred Segal-esque retail space in Old Town, she's also running great shops in Kierland Commons and DC Ranch. Yes, you can get Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses and Theory pants elsewhere in town, but nobody, and we mean nobody, picks pieces with a better eye than Croll and company. It's like having a personal shopper to pare down the collections to leave us with only the high notes — and then arranging them so artfully, we really can't help buying more things than we'd planned. We get confused in department stores, but at Jennifer Croll, we just get lucky.