Mike Kilgore, vice president of marketing and design at Wisconsin Plastics, has seen a lot in his 26 years with the Green Bay-based company. When he first joined, Wisconsin Plastics was in the process of transitioning from just a manufacturer into a product development and manufacturing firm.
He details his personal career journey as well as the past, present and future of the company in a conversation with Insight’s Kate Bruns and the NEW Manufacturing Alliance’s Ann Franz on this week’s episode of the NEW Manufacturing Insights podcast, sponsored by Stoke RGA.
Of course, adding design and product development hasn’t been the only major change in the company’s history. It actually started as a heavy steel fabricator in 1972 — no, Kilgore says, it wasn’t called “Wisconsin Plastics” back then — and transitioned to plastics in 1982.
Today, Kilgore tells the co-hosts of NEW Manufacturing Insights, he considers Wisconsin Plastics more than anything else an “idea company.”
“There’s a lot of injection molders in the state, in this state and in the United States, and what they’ll do is they’ll bring in your parts, they’ll make your parts, and they send them back to you,” Kilgore shares on Episode 135. “What we do is a value-add aspect to that. … We’re going to make your product for you, not just make a part that’s sent to a third-party assembler and they put it together. … We can be a really good design house that can give our customers who are working on design work for a manufacturing solution, or we can give our current customers that we’re doing manufacturing for design solutions for their products.”
Listen to the full episode on Apple, Spotify or any audio podcast platform to learn about one of Kilgore’s design innovations that has transformed the grocery-buying experience and hear what he considers his best leadership insight — a philosophy about ownership that guides his work.
NEW Manufacturing Insights is a joint project of Insight and the NEW Manufacturing Alliance, produced by Woodward Community Media. New episodes are released weekly.
