The Kula Ring

For 42 years, StarTech.com sold cables, docks and adapters to IT professionals through the channel, building its reputation on quality and service. Then more IT buyers started shopping outside the channel, often on Amazon, and startup competitors arrived with consumer-style brands already built. CMO Michael Barber has spent 14 months on a brand refresh for that buyer. He argues that B2B buyers sti...

Most manufacturers are great at making products and weak at showing them. Hammed Arowosegbe, co-founder of SwiftXR, argues the fix already exists inside most engineering departments: the CAD file. He walks through how SwiftXR turns those files into 3D, augmented reality, and virtual reality experiences that buyers can explore on a website, with a what-you-see-is-what-you-get accuracy that photos a...

Structural Concepts makes the refrigerated and heated display cases in coffee shops, supermarkets, and convenience stores, products designed to fade into the background. In a crowded, me-too category, Director of Marketing Patrick Rooney brought a CPG approach to the challenge of standing out. He explains how customer and sales research led to one common understanding of the brand, “Delivering Fre...

Eve Chen has spent nearly three decades asking how companies turn market opportunity into predictable revenue, and her answer centers on who is actually doing the buying. With Forrester putting the average B2B buying group at 13 internal stakeholders plus nine external influencers, she argues revenue teams need a buyer’s playbook as rigorous as their seller’s playbook. Drawing on a night navigatio...

Marcelo Kreindel took an unlikely route into manufacturing marketing—from an Argentinian software career to fifteen years running a wholesale gelato business to building North Shore Steel’s marketing department from scratch. That winding path shaped a rare kind of patience, and it produced the insight at the heart of this conversation: the message discipline marketers apply to customers is exactly...

Inbolt’s AI vision guidance now steers 200+ robots across 100+ factories at Stellantis, Toyota, Ford, and GM, and Carl Standertskjold runs the entire marketing function alone. He joins Jeff and Carman to talk about what changes when a startup shifts from landing first logos to expanding inside a plant, and how a team of one holds up under it. Carl builds every plan down from the business outcome,...

Why a Two-Person Marketing Team Runs on Relationships in Plastics Manufacturing

Josue Vermes took a winding path—high-end wine, JPMorgan, Amazon apparel at HanesBrands—before landing as the most senior marketer at Carolina Handling, a Raymond forklift dealer expanding into intralogistics. In this episode he makes the case for borrowing B2C discipline without abandoning B2B fundamentals: geotargeted paid media, streaming TV built around football season, a video-first podcast,...

Maria Birdwell came to industrial packaging from media and advertising, with no B2B background and no allegiance to how the category has always sold itself. At Franklin Mountain Packaging, a corrugated manufacturer that started up in 2022, she markets a young company against multi-generational competitors by refusing to fight on age or even on machinery. Instead she lets customer requirements driv...

Benjamin Toomey didn’t come to additive manufacturing from engineering — he came from fireworks and craft beer. That outsider’s vantage turns out to be the point. In this episode, Ben tells Jeff White and Carman Pirie how he went from feeling like an alien at his first trade show to becoming a “messenger” who can connect large-format 3D printing to a stranger’s field of interest. Along the way he...

Chris Persson sells something buyers never see: polypropylene fiber woven into cars, couches, and carpets. On this episode he unpacks the peculiar challenge of marketing an ingredient brand with a guerrilla-sized budget, and why the sustainability pitch keeps colliding with a price tag. His answer is a reframe he calls “sustainability plus one” — lead with a greener story, then stack innovation, c...

Nancy Verdezoto-Feijoo spent 15 years as a reporter and editor in Ecuador before landing in Manitoba as marketing manager at IHT Group, which builds heating, cooling, and lighting systems for the swine industry. She argues the newsroom taught her the one skill industrial marketers most often skip: listen before you speak. Her buyers are technical, deeply experienced, and allergic to buzzwords, and...

ElectraMet uses electrochemistry to pull copper and other critical minerals out of industrial wastewater — technology invented by PhDs and sold to wastewater managers at the world’s largest semiconductor fabs. Chris Richardson, a communications major with no electrochemical background, has to make that legible without dumbing it down. His answer isn’t better explaining. It’s association: make sure...

In a category where production outstrips demand and the end customer cares more about how a room looks than whose logo is on the box, Mauricio Inglada makes a counterintuitive case: the brand that matters most is the one you build with your distribution channel. As VP of Sales & Marketing at Del Conca USA, he walks Jeff and Carman through winning at the channel level — earning distributor trust, r...

Shane Colella, an Emmy-winning cinematographer turned marketing director at automation firm Westfalia Technologies, makes the case that the agentic era has no historical analog — and that the marketers who win won’t wait for permission to find out. He walks through the agentic infrastructure he’s actually building, from research dashboards to a Claude-and-n8n pipeline that erases hours of list-bui...

Authenticity was a Web 2.0 buzzword — and Luke Wittenbraker, Marketing and Sales Director at Mactech On-Site, argues it matters more than ever now that AI can make every brand sound the same. In this episode, Luke explains why blue-collar buyers see straight through corporate jargon, how he turned ten years of CRM data into short, punchy “job stories” that actually generate leads, and why figuring...

When private equity owns the company, the clock is always running — and as Paul Olesh, CEO of Magneto Movement, puts it, everybody has an expiration date. Paul joins Jeff and Carman to explain how that urgency reshapes marketing inside a PE-backed platform: why a long 18-to-30-month sales cycle demands relentless funnel-building, how he holds his acquired brands together under a single Procter & G...

For Impack, a Quebec maker of folder-gluer packaging equipment, video does something a spec sheet can’t: it sells machines prospects often won’t see in person until late in the deal. Brand Creative Lead Dmytro Zhurov explains how a well-produced video becomes proof of a six-figure machine’s quality—when the production matches the price tag, buyers trust that the product does too. He digs into usin...

Milford built its business on relationships in oil and gas. But breaking HDPE pipe into the municipal water market meant playing an entirely different game — one of competitive bids, regulatory hurdles, and contractors set in their ways. Tyler Fowler, Director of Marketing at Milford, explains why relationships rarely cross verticals even when the product does, and why he and his competitors put t...

Account-based marketing isn’t new to manufacturers, but the way they have to run it is unlike anyone else’s. In this episode, Demandbase’s Nick Cholakis unpacks the defining tension of industrial ABM: a sales cycle that can stretch past two years, punctuated by a buying window that slams open and shut in weeks. With most research now happening anonymously and offline — increasingly inside LLMs — N...

As a solo marketer in a 30-person engineering firm, Reshmee Bissundyal has built something most industrial companies struggle to achieve: a LinkedIn presence that actually drives inbound leads. In this episode, Reshmee walks us through how she dramatically grew Mechanical Solutions’ LinkedIn following. Reshmee shares her approach to content planning and why she often leads with emotion rather than...

Helene Tessier didn't plan a career in marketing. She started at the French consulate in China and taught English abroad. When COVID brought her home, she stumbled into TPAC as an interpreter. Soon after, leadership asked her to run marketing. In this conversation with Jeff and Carman, she explains why TPAC's PhD-heavy, flat organizational culture wanted someone willing to learn. She also shares h...

Teikoku USA makes the canned motor pumps that the chemical, hydrocarbon, and nuclear industries reach for when leaking is not an option. For years, growing public awareness of dangerous chemicals quietly expanded the company's addressable market for them. Then, leadership asked the sales and marketing team to grow faster anyway. Chaitanya Sakhalkar joins The Kula Ring to share what came next: modu...

Most small-to-mid manufacturers know they’ve under-invested in marketing, but where do you even begin? Javier Lozano, Founder of Bolder Media and a fractional CMO, joins Carman and Jeff to lay the foundation. He explains why your founder's origin story falls flat, how to mine real differentiation from customer interviews, and why your brand should be more Yoda, the guide, than Luke, the hero. Plus...

Brandon Clark, VP of Marketing at Q-Pac, joins Jeff and Carman to unpack what it really means to create a new product category within a deeply traditional industry. Q-Pac makes multimotor plenum fans, a commercial HVAC product that looks like a fan array on the surface but operates as a fundamentally different technology. Brandon explains how the company defined the category and why they invested...