P-O-P People to Watch: Bill Kambol, Nestle Purina PetCare

The day P-O-P Times spoke with Bill Kambol an event was being held in the company lobby for Purina employees to vote on which one of their pets had the best smile. The pet company often throws events around new product launches and sometimes dogs even lounge around the office. The campus is even fit with stations to help clean up after your pet. Name: Bill KambolCompany: Nestle Purina PetCare, St. LouisTitle: Display and Merchandising SpecialistAge: 39Education: BFA in Industrial Design, Purdue UniversityThe day P-O-P Times spoke with Bill Kambol an event was being held in the company lobby for Purina employees to vote on which one of their pets had the best smile. The pet company often throws events around new product launches and sometimes dogs even lounge around the office. The campus is even fit with stations to help clean up after your pet.The environment sounds lively and awfully different from his days as a display designer at Great Northern Corp. (an old Little League and College friend got him into the company) and then at Chesapeake Display, where he first worked with Joyce Courtenay at Purina. They rolled out a quarter pallet on wheels that held 180 pounds of product. Courtenay later invited Kambol to visit with Purina, and he made his leap into PetCare."At that time, I loved designing, but I wanted to get out from behind the desk and do more than just CAD work," Kambol says. "I love that part of it, but wanted more. I wanted to get out and meet the customers, visit the copackers. I would get a project dropped on my desk and I wondered where did this come from, why am I creating this, what's it for?"Sure sounds like a marketer. Briefly, what are your duties at Nestle Purina?I work on P-O-P for all of our pet food and Tidy Cat items, any in-aisle displays. When I say P-O-P, we define it two ways: Stuff that goes out with product, whether prepacked or not, and P-O-S we define as shelf talkers, paper P-O-P. I don't get too involved in that. I do temporary floor displays, quarter pallets, PDQ trays, and I average one or two permanent projects a year. How has your design experience with Chesapeake and Great Northern benefited you at Nestle?It's huge for me. Sometimes I wonder how people do the job without design experience. I use it all the time, whether I'm sketching a new idea, or taking someone's verbal idea and putting it to a drawing, or working with my vendors. Sometimes, I reverse the roles, meaning I'll layout the objectives, and I won't do any design on it. But once they come to me with ideas, I'll kick into design mode: "What if we did this; what if we did that; you have two ideas here, what if we combine those two?" How difficult was the transition to the CPG side, what were the nuances or parts of the job that were most challenging to pick up?It was understanding the marketing lingo, and, really, understanding the pet food industry, the pet aisle and who our shoppers are. I think the adjustment at first was not being on a CAD and being able to crank displays out but learning how to use my skills properly to educate our marketing groups and educate our vendors. I wanted to become that bridge between the two of them. To my vendors, I'm a marketing guy. To my marketing people, I'm a design guy. But, the transition was really something I was looking forward to -- learning more about P-O-P and where the problems first generate, not just, here, build me a piece. And now I'm getting opportunities to work directly with the retailers on certain projects and getting more involved with some overseas projects. It looks like you get your hands dirty testing P-O-P, elaborate? One thing that is unique about our product is that it can be very heavy and a lot of the packaging is flexible. It's not a rigid packaging. Let's say, you have a 20-pound-bag of dog food. You have to prepare for the product to settle. The way it leaves the line at the plant, to the shape that it takes when it leaves the copacker, to the shape that it takes at the retailer are three different shapes. I really struggled at first, because I would get a sample order from the plant and build this display around the size of that bag. Maybe it settled more making that trip than going from the copacker to the retailer. I really had to adjust to that. The first couple displays, the bags were so unsettled that the bags were larger than the display, and I had some interesting situations. Now, I have to figure out density in the food, and know what the maximum density would be off the line. If it's meat, fish, it all settles differently, so all of the products are different, too. We started to create testing that reflected the supply chain, meaning we'd build the display, stack it, put it in high humidity for a period of time, create a vibration test that would simulate going from a co-packer to a DC. It sounds like a lot, but while myself and our vendors are in that mode, if you're a designer, there's always that jump of faith when you make something and wait for that phone call when it's totally destroyed, and that cold sweat runs down your back. I remind myself, and I remind my vendors, would you rather have that cold sweat at the testing lab or at retail? What are the big challenges in the pet industry now?I know P-O-P Times has a yearly review that looks at why displays weren't set up, or were they setup? Where I can help out, is making sure the displays out in the field are easy to set up. I'm hoping as we do more and more displays. The retailers see our displays and think, 'I just did a Purina display last week, and that was pretty easy. I'll throw that out there. I won't have to assign someone 2 hours to put this together.' I want to make sure the money we spend on those displays are getting executed. What do you love most about your job?Every day is a little bit different. Last week, I spent one day at a copacker, spent another day at one of our manufacturing plants, who put together a display for us. There are days where we sit down and have idea sessions for a new packaging or display project, and there are days I'm just making sure the "i's" are dotted and the "t's" are crossed. I work with so many different brands, so many different people, seven or eight different brands. Nothing is ever the same. What hobbies do you have?I hang out with my kids, try to play golf when I can. But really right now, I'm trying to plan my college football schedule. I grew up in South Bend, Ind., Notre Dame area, so I'm huge into that. I'm a Purdue fan, Notre Dame comes second.