Job title: Director Home Care R&D
Department: Technology
At Henkel since: 2004

Why did you start working with Henkel?
I came to Dial about 12 years ago. Dial today is part of Henkel by acquisition. I had previously been working at Procter&Gamble and I thought that Dial offered more opportunities to do a larger variety of activities and that you’re given more responsibility at an earlier stage. So I wanted to come to a place where I could make some decisions on my own and where I would be allowed more autonomy, which  turned out to be true.

What makes your job attractive?
I work in the field of new product development. What seems attractive to me is that when you finish producing a product, we get to see it in the store. I can call my family and tell them to go buy the product. It is exciting to see something that is tangible and something you can share with other people. I can actually see the fruits of my labor later on.

Did you have a mentor?
Not so much in the beginning, but later on I had some people who were mentoring me, who were kind of helping me to figure out my role within the company and to find out how I would best interact with other functions.

How have your resonsibilities changed?
When I first started working at Dial, I was working in personal care with bath soap product development and I helped develop various new bath soap products. After a short while I started doing body wash as well and after that I was promoted to manager and moved to the air freshener section. There I was responsible for developing new air freshener products. That was a relatively short assignment. Then I moved to our laundry care area where I had the responsibility for the joint venture that we had with Henkel. I was working together with Henkel to launch the tablet detergent product in the U.S.. That was a lot of fun because as a product developer you normally work in your lab developing your formula, etc.. When we did the joint venture, I was working with people at Henkel to develop the product. They had a pre-existing product and we were trying to make it work in our cost structure and our U.S. machines. So it was fun going back and forth in terms of what works here and what works in Germany. Also learning from a cultural standpoint, it was interesting to learn about a completely different culture – both from a geographic and corporate culture standpoint.