Packable
I was a brand manager, working on Packable’s CPG team. I managed the 3P businesses for Nestle Health Science and 3M, helping drive profitable sales growth across multiple eCommerce platforms.
Managing brands across multiple channels requires skill, attention, and a healthy amount of Biotin.
Okay, the Biotin bit is obviously a bit of a joke, but in actuality my role had me oversee brands within Nestle Health Science (including Nature's Bounty, Puritan’s Pride, and Solgar) and 3M (think Command, Scotch, and FUTURO) across multiple major eCommerce channels.
My previous experience working for Walmart and selling 1P on Amazon gave me the skills I needed to help these brands grow on both platforms, and my industry knowledge helped me help them succeed on Target, eBay, and our D2C site.
2022 was a rocky time for Packable. I helped organize the negotiations that drove our biggest, most successful KPI improvements.
When the SPAC market dried up and the economy tightened due to inflation, the financial model of our company had to change almost overnight. Our entire CPG organization was tasked with pivoting on a dime from a revenue-at-all-costs business model to a bottoms-up, profit-driving assortment of brand partnerships.
This dramatic shift had to happen quickly to ensure financial solvency and required all of our business leaders to renegotiate contracts, trade rates, assortment offerings, and fundamental cost structures with every onboarded supplier. I developed a negotiation tracker that enabled these conversations and gave leadership quick but insightful visibility into the progress we were making. As a result of this work and the organizational structure I helped develop, we exceeded our goals for revamped contracts, cost improvements, and retained partnerships.
Flipping a business model requires you to know your business inside-out. I had the processes and recurring analyses in place to make this happen for my brands. There’s probably a Scotch-related pun I could put in here, but it’s escaping me at the moment.
In addition to helping lead our CPG organizations overall negotiations and tracking efforts, I had to run my own businesses under our new financial model. In order to effectively negotiate and make the interventions in my businesses necessary to succeed, I had to set up and maintain recurring and in-depth financial analyses.
In addition to company-wide workstreams on profit analysis, cost validation, and supply chain forecasting, I developed replicable financial analysis tools that drove channel expansion within my brands (specifically to Walmart Fulfillment Services and Fulfilled by Amazon channels, which were our most profitable channels), as well as competitive assortment expansion (by identifying already-successful marketplace items that Packable was not actively competing on). These tools helped me retain revenue within my brands and support my division’s newly identified profit-oriented mission.
Oh, I’ve got it: My financial analysis held together my businesses better than Heavy Duty, Guaranteed to Stay Sealed, Scotch Packaging Tape™. (Okay not my best work, but you get the gist.)
Timeline:
Brand Manager: November 2021-August 2022
I worked mostly out of our New York City office with a team that was split between NYC and our Long Island offices.