Paula Gamer: My mother was in sales. So that’s where I got it. And I remember I was like in ninth grade. And they get, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” And I am like, “I want to be in sales.” It’s like, “Well, what do you want to sell?” I don’t care, I just wanted to be in sales because my mother was.

Adam Honig: Hello and welcome to the “Make it. Move it. Sell It.” podcast. On this podcast, I talk with company leaders about how they’re modernizing the business of making, moving, and selling products, and of course, having fun along the way. I’m your host, Adam Honig, the CEO of spiro.ai. We make amazing AI software for companies in the supply chain.

But we’re not going to be talking about that today. Instead, today we’re going to be talking to Paula Gamer: , the president and CEO of Gamer Packaging, which is a professional packaging company that offers custom packaging solutions. Welcome to the podcast, Paula.

Paula Gamer: Well, thank you, Adam. Thank you for having me.

Adam Honig: Yeah, it’s super exciting. Professional packaging company. Tell us a little bit more about gamer packaging and what you guys actually do.

Paula Gamer: The business was started 37 years ago by my father-in-law, and we are in consumer packaged goods packaging. So any product that you’d see in a Target, a grocery store, or a liquor store, any package—that is something that we could provide, and we source the manufacturers; we oversee the production and the shipment of the packaging to the consumer packaged goods manufacturing sites.

Adam Honig: Gotcha. Can you tell us some of the brands that you do this work with?

Paula Gamer: Some of our longest and largest customers are, for example, Hormel Foods. We do everything from bacon bits to big jars for pigs feet. We do a lot of private-label manufacturing. So Giovanni Foods, for example, in the northeast, may sell some product with their name on it, but it could also be selling a product with Mama’s pasta sauce on it.

So who knows who the label might actually be? Another fun one we’re doing that’s relatively new is Hume. They’re all over deodorant and body spray. So they’re kind of a fun, up-and-coming customer. Probably our oldest customer is Watkins. Actually, this was our first customer, and they do spices and vanilla extracts—that kind of thing.

Adam Honig: Gotcha. When a company comes to you and they’re like, “Hey, we obviously have this product; we need to package it,” How do you engage with them and understand what the goal of the packaging is? How does that work?

Paula Gamer: Well, the first thing we do is sit down and say, What is your vision? And they might say, “I don’t know. We just know it needs to be about eight ounces, or it’s in the can, and we want about a 12-ounce can.” Well, we talk to them about all the different possible sizes and shapes that are known on the market today.

And if they’re like, “No, those don’t fit my needs. I want something more unique,” then we get our packaging engineer on with them, even over a Zoom call, and he’ll bring up a package to start with, and they might say, “No, I want the shoulders a little softer. I wanted to indent the hourglass shape, ”whatever, and our engineer will draw it right in front of them, and we’ll create their packaging.

We have had people come to us literally with just a drawing on a napkin and saying, “My buddies were at the bar last night, and this is what we envision.” And we can get that all the way to a 3D print or a Lucite mold. Then, we’ll go find a manufacturer for them. We’ll find out what the minimum order quantities are. We’ll get it all priced out, give them the lead times, and get it sent to them.

Adam Honig: Wow. That’s super cool. I have always wondered about this. The companies are obviously looking to contain products in food. They don’t want it to spoil or stuff like that, but they want it to sell. So are they looking for a unique or differentiated product on the shelf? Is that a big part of the requirements that you get? 

Paula Gamer: Of course. Yes. We need to help them differentiate themselves on the shelves. Now, to keep price points down, they may go with a standard food-grade 8-ounce jar, but then it’s the graphics or the labeling, or maybe it’s embossing their name on the glass or putting something on the top of the lid, embossing their graphics—anything to get them to stand out.

But because it does become a little bit more expensive, if you’re going to totally make a custom bottle or glass, our glass shaped bottle, the minimums are going to be higher and it’s going to be a little bit more expensive. So, a stock glass, plastic, or aluminum vessel is probably the least expensive, and then differentiate yourself through graphics, labeling, or embossing something along those lines.

Adam Honig: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. When you’re describing the shoulders and the head, I keep thinking of Mrs. Butterworth’s maple syrup packaging from my childhood. I don’t even know if that’s still a thing anymore, but there was a bottle in the shape of a lady, right?

Paula Gamer: Yes. Obviously, that was probably a custom bottle. And I don’t know where Mrs. Butterworth had that made, but she got some glass manufacturer to make her a mold in that shape, and they probably made a whole bunch of them, and then eventually, like, or even think of, like the PET, the plastic Honey Bear shape.

Initially, probably someone went to a plastics manufacturer and said, Build us a mold that looks like a honeybee. And now that’s just become a stock mold. So if you’re a honey company and you want a honey bear, that’s going to be a stock mold that we can get our hands on.

Adam Honig: Gotcha. Well, I think, the power of the packaging is just dawning on me how strong the branding was from that Mrs. Butterworth from 40 years ago. It’s still in my head somewhere. 

Paula Gamer: That is. That means someone did a really good job and stuck with you.

Adam Honig: Can you share some of the more creative or out-of-this-world kinds of designs that you guys have worked on?

Paula Gamer: Okay. Well, this was probably about 20 years ago for a Wisconsin-based cheese company. They wanted a cheese that you could squeeze out of a container for prison commissaries. But the packaging—they didn’t want the closure to be removed so that a prisoner could, in turn, maybe urinate in that and then squirt it out and use it as a weapon.

So we had to develop this squeezable cheese spread for prison commissaries where the closure couldn’t be removed later, and then the vessel was used as a weapon. So that’s probably a really interesting one.

Adam Honig: Wow. Well, I guess, from a prison standpoint, there aren’t too many products in that area, but that’s kind of an amazing story about having to develop packaging that wouldn’t be used as a weapon. That’s super interesting. Today, what I’m hearing a lot about in packaging and what I’m seeing in my own life is a lot about sustainability. How big is this for your customers?

Paula Gamer: Very big. Everyone wants sustainability. Unfortunately, at this point, it can still cost more money. Let’s say you’re a small, up-and-coming brand and you can’t order 5 million of this bottle. You’re only going to start with a million or even 500,000. We might have to take that production offshore because the U.S. manufacturers may not be interested in that quantity. It’s too small. And then, when you get into some of the offshore manufacturing, we might not have quite as much control over the resin content and how much of that is post-consumable resin. But with U.S. manufacturers, there is more control, but it still costs a little bit more.

Unfortunately, the packaging can end up, in some situations, being a good percentage of the cost of goods per unit for the manufacturer of the product. So any little penny or $0.02 they can save on a package, per bottle, or per unit really adds up. And it might just be that little bit more to go with a recyclable product. Or for example, it depends who you’re talking to, but I would argue that glass is the most recyclable product, but glass is heavier. So even getting it from here to there costs more and then leaves more of a carbon footprint.

But once it gets into the consumer’s home, it is probably the most recyclable. People may feel plastic is. But then some kind of virgin plastic or PCR plastic product, but if they put a shrink sleeve over that, that’s not recyclable; that whole package really isn’t recyclable unless the end user in their home actually goes and rips off that shrink sleeve label. And that doesn’t always happen.

Education all the way down to the end user, to the consumer, isn’t there. So we need to keep educating everybody, and as a distributor of packaging, we can advise our customers. Our brand owners, who are the manufacturers, are offering the most cost-competitive recyclable options, and if something isn’t as recyclable, we’ll point it out.

But at the end of the day, it is our brands that will make the decision on what they’re going to use for packaging. We just want to make sure it’s an option.

Adam Honig: The plastic recycling process is really complicated. I feel like I’m in a constant fight with our recycling provider here about what’s recyclable and what’s not. And it’s super hard to tell. So I understand that dilemma.

Paula Gamer: It is. So there’s a really broad-based educational piece that needs to happen with all the consumers.

Adam Honig: Yeah. From your experience, do you feel like it’s a top three focus of the manufacturers to have ecologically friendly packaging, or is it more like a 5 or 6 priority?

Paula Gamer: I would say it’s in the top three for most manufacturers to offer that. Again, for a small manufacturer, it may not be quite as important, and for some, their focus might be to get the least expensive packaging out there for people. Let’s hit a price point for a start-up. And then that might not be as great of a concern.

But boy, when you look at any of them, the manufacturers we use, or on any of their websites, when they come in and visit our salespeople, they always talk about their sustainability story. They definitely offer it.

Adam Honig: Yeah. You mentioned earlier that the cost of the packaging can sometimes be a pretty good percentage of the cost of the goods. Is there a rule of thumb that people use to determine how much they want to spend on packaging?

Paula Gamer: No, it really depends on the industry. If you’re buying an 80-ounce bottle of whiskey, that glass bottle probably costs 50 bucks. But if you’re looking to buy a knockoff brand or a bottle of water, I mean, this is probably $0.05. So, it really depends on the industry, but I would say that for high-end cosmetics, high-end spirits, and high-end personal care products, the cost of the packaging is going to be higher. And sometimes they push back more on us, like we got to get the price because the price of the product itself is so expensive. So they really sometimes want to lower the cost per unit on the packaging.

Adam Honig: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I worked in cosmetic manufacturing in the summers during college, and the cost of a lipstick is actually quite low. It’s everything that kind of goes with it. Of course, you have to have the right color, design, and everything like that to go with it. But the packaging could be more than the material that goes into the lipstick—not the whole design of it and stuff like that. But yeah.

Paula Gamer: Exactly. That’s where we really might start getting some pushback, like, we’ve got to lower this. This is too much of a portion of our cost of goods.

Adam Honig: Yeah. But, like we were talking about earlier, people do buy based on the packaging in a lot of cases too. My wife loves Casa Azul tequila. Do you know that particular one with the bell on top, and I’m always like, How much of this cost is going to the bottle and the bell and everything like that?

Paula Gamer: It’s their brand, it’s their image, and it’s the whole. Some people, gosh, I’d argue that like really helps sell them on it. I mean, it could maybe be really crappy tequila, but if they put it in the right packaging, someone’s going to think, This is great. We sell to a lot of distilleries, and vodka’s always a big one.

I’ll talk to one distiller, and they’ll say there’s no difference between vodkas. And it really is just who packages it and who markets it the best. And then you talk to a high-end vodka distiller, and they’re like, It makes all the difference in the world. We use only water that’s been distilled 50 times, the purest water, and the purest ingredients.

Adam Honig: Carried by mule down from the Himalayas, that’s the only water we would ever use.

Paula Gamer: A lot of it is marketing. It’s really interesting, as a lot of times people see a common brand on the shelf and they think, “Oh, this must be some huge company here on the back end.” And I’ll give you a prime example: Mike’s Hard Lemonade. There was not a big, huge company that was like 3 guys. They are great marketers.

So sometimes it’s just a really small group of really savvy marketers who have an idea and can bring it to market. They find a co-packer. They’re really not even touching the product, and it is very successful.

Adam Honig: Yeah. Well, I think we’re seeing that in Liquid Death. That brand is gone everywhere. 

Paula Gamer: Isn’t that crazy? Yes. They keep coming out with different offshoots and ways to maybe add some things and broaden the offerings. But this is a great example.

Adam Honig: Yeah. Well, I really enjoy this stuff because it just shows how creative you can be in business. People think, at least I did. Growing up, I thought business was boring, but look at all the fun stuff that’s going on here. 

Let’s shift gears for a minute. I want to talk a little bit about your role as the CEO and the leader of the organization. One of the things I like to ask people is, How do you think about your role as a leader of the organization and where you should put your focus?

Paula Gamer: Well, we’re a family-owned industry, so that makes us a little different. So as a family-owned company, I see it as my job as president and CEO to make sure that this company is financially viable and solid. We have 75 employees. I want to make sure every single one of them has a job and a job that pays well, and they’re counting on us to support their families. So it’s my job to be a good steward of the business and make sure that I’m there for first and foremost our employees and then, of course, our supplier partners and our customers.

Many of our competitors are private equity-owned. We’re one of the very few family-owned packaging distribution companies left. And especially of our size that are left. And I think it’s important because there is a space for us. As a family-owned business, our secret sauce is that we make decisions, maybe not for what’s best financially right this second, but we can see, “You know what? If we can make this work right now, maybe we’re not going to make enough margin right now, but we could see this growing and building into something.” Then we’ll do that.

Whereas a PE firm, they’re just going to take what are the bottom line numbers right now to date. What’s the return today? Are we overstaffed by a couple? We’ll just lay them off. We don’t do that.

During COVID, packaging just went crazy, and everyone was eating and drinking at home. So they weren’t drinking beer out of a keg at a bar. They were buying individual cans of beer, and they weren’t eating at restaurants. They were opening up the jar of spaghetti sauce at home. So our business just exploded. Everyone is looking for packaging, not to mention all the hand sanitizer packaging. The seller in the world was calling us and wanting hand sanitizer packaging, so at any rate.

We had to build up. We had to add a few headcounts just to deal with what was going on in the market. But when it slowed back down and our business is still really strong, it went down 10%–15% post-Covid, and now I’m at a normal trajectory. We don’t lay anyone off.

But right now we’re back selling. So it works. But as a family-owned company, we just won’t do that. Our employees really do come first, and then after that, our suppliers and customers are very important. But if I don’t have good suppliers, I don’t have anything to offer my customers. So we really treat our suppliers like gold. The gold that they are and many of the PE firms, competitors don’t necessarily treat their suppliers like that. They treat their suppliers like, Hey, I’m going to bring you all this business. You work for me. We don’t have that attitude.

Then, in the end, it allows us to provide better service to our customers. And we have happy, fulfilled employees. We have happy suppliers that we’re transparent with. So I think that’s the difference between a family-owned company, and I think it’s my job to make sure that that culture and those values remain.

Adam Honig: Yeah. Well, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, your name is literally on the door. I see this with a lot of the people I talk to in family-owned businesses; they treat the company as family. They are much more inclined that way, and often, like, there is just a lot of that good feeling throughout the business that way.

Paula Gamer: For sure. I would say that before the pandemic, I knew every single one of my employees’s husbands or wives’s names. I knew their kid’s name. I probably knew their dog’s name. And then COVID happened, and we all went to Zoom, and now we’re back in the office two days a week, but only two days a week. And I would like to see it more because I do think something is lost in culture. For example, we do a “Pet of the Month” and we put it on our social media, and there was a Pet of the Month on their Leo the Cat. And I’m like, I don’t know who Leo the Cat is?

Why do I not know who this cat is? And it really bothered me. And it’s because what’s missing is when I’m just running into someone in the hall or at the coffee machine and I’m like, How was your weekend? Oh, you know what? We got a new kitten. We named him Leo. It is. It’s what I thrive on: a family-owned business.

But I think, unfortunately, some of it’s been lost a little bit. 

Adam Honig: Yeah. Are you planning on moving to more in person then?

Paula Gamer: I really want to go three days a week, and the leadership team does. Not all our employees feel that way. So, I’m really trying to let everyone weigh in and get everyone’s opinion. What’s interesting, though, is that there are some employees that do want to come back, and sometimes I think it’s maybe some of our newer employees; maybe they’re newer out of school.

They don’t have the family structures or built-out structures that someone like myself would. And I think they look at it as a way to get out of their house. They are like, Maybe I’m going to go have lunch with my coworker.

Adam Honig: It’s like social involvement.

Paula Gamer: Do you want to go out and get a beer after work? I do think we do have some employees who are hoping we come back in three days. We’ll never come back. I do think that ship has sailed, but I’d like to settle in at about three.

Adam Honig: Yeah, we’re doing two days a week now, and we just increased our office space to get to three to provide a little bit more amenities and stuff like that. It looks like you have a very nice office setup, but that’s part of our strategy and not really forcing people to come in.

Paula Gamer: But we are actually probably moving in about a year, lease situation. So, we’re in a B-class office building in downtown Minneapolis. And we are very close to signing a lease with an A-Class building that has many more amenities. And we are hoping that when we move into that new building that has a bunch of really nice new things, that could be a draw, and we could lure people back in three days.

But Adam, how are your employees feeling about it?

Adam Honig: Well, I think everybody’s of two minds. People want to be together, they want to be social, and they want to have a beer after work, but they like walking their dogs at lunch. That’s the thing. Everybody’s got childcare and stuff like that that they’ve got to deal with. And having more flexibility is really helpful.

So, we’re trying to navigate that. But I think, especially with what you said for new hires, they should have connectivity to the organization. There’s a lot of things that we have documented, but there’s a lot of things that are kind of still an oral tradition at the business. Getting them that oral tradition, it just doesn’t work so well over Zoom, and having a relationship where you’re the CEO and I’m the CEO with a new employee, having them have the courage or confidence to say, Hey, I think that this is a problem. That takes a relationship, and somebody’s not just going to send you an email that doesn’t know you well, saying that there’s a problem.

Paula Gamer: They’re not going to do it. I’ll tell you one other thing too. I said, Let’s do core business hours too. So if it’s more convenient for you to maybe walk your dog in the morning before you come in, and then you’re going to get your three kids ready and drop them off at school, boy, it just would make your life so much easier if you just got in at 9:30 or 10:00 in the morning. I don’t care.

So the two days were Tuesday and Wednesday, and I was like, Just try to be in core business hours if everyone was in from 10 to 3. So we knew everyone; that’s when you were going to catch people in the office, and then you could leave at 3:00 and go to your kid’s soccer game or whatever. I don’t care.

Now, that might mean you need to get back online after dinner at 7:00 for an hour or something. I don’t care, but I just think core business hours are another way of trying to alleviate some of the pressures around coming back into the office.

Adam Honig: Yeah, I think that’s a really good strategy, too.

There’s another topic I wanted to talk about for a minute, which is women in sales. I know that this is something that you have a lot of passion for, Paula. And I know you started your career in sales, so I imagine that’s kind of why. But why do you feel like there should be extra support and focus on that?

Paula Gamer: Because I still think we’re just women. I say “we.” We’re just not quite there. It’s still not quite a level playing field. My mother was in sales. So that’s where I got it. And I remember being in ninth grade. And they get, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” And I am like, “I want to be in sales.” It’s like, “Well, what do you want to sell?” I don’t care; I just wanted to be in sales because my mother was.

She was very successful and was the primary breadwinner for many years. There were six of us kids. So the fact that she held on to this great career with six kids, I thought, was really cool. 

And then she was always very supportive of me. But then, I had my own career in sales. I sold computers, and then I met my husband and married into this family business. And then we had a couple of kids, and I’m like, boy, this traveling is really tough. I had a large territory. So, I was traveling on a plane a lot, like cross-country. Finally, I just said I couldn’t do this anymore. So I left the workforce and stayed home to raise my kids. And I just went crazy. I like to think I’m a good mother, but I don’t know why it’s hard.

Adam Honig: I’ll tell you, having kids is harder than working a lot of the time.

Paula Gamer: It’s really hard. I’d like to think I’ve been a better mother to adult children. I did have a psychologist once tell me. You can’t be a good mother at every stage of their life. You can’t be a good mother with an infant, a 4-year-old, a teenager, and an adult.

You’re probably going to be better in one phase or another. So maybe mine was in small children, but at any rate, I was able to come back into the workforce because I was married into this family business and basically was almost like a pseudo-board member. I was still involved in the background. So, I had this great luxury of being able to step into a career and immediately start producing and giving back.

Most women don’t have that luxury if they leave the workforce to raise their kids, even for 5–10 years. You know, you’re in IT. It’s just like, imagine if someone left the workforce for 5 years. What happens in your industry?

Adam Honig: It’s completely different 

Paula Gamer: Yes, it’s completely different. But the hope would be that employers like you would realize if someone was smart enough and had the wherewithal and the work ethic, and they learned it the first time. You know what? You may need to bring them back up to speed, but they’re going to be able to get it, and they’re going to be able to do it.

And I think we need to be kind with our salespeople, whether they are men or women. People are trying to raise families, and we’re a family-owned business. So if someone’s like, “Gosh, you know, I’m scared to go work this trade show for a game or three days a week after next week, you know what? That’s my kid’s graduation.” I’m like, “No, don’t worry about it. We’ll find someone else to go.” I mean, and then I’m like, “Hey, someone raise your hand. Anyone want to go do this?” And there’s probably an employee in sales who is single and says, “Gosh, going to Vegas for three days sounds like a blast to me. I’ll go.” So just working with our parents, male or female, allowing them to stay in the workforce and giving them what they need so they can do both family and work.

Because people have so much to offer. But I will go back to Adam; no offense to you or any of the males out there that might hear this, so my mother, I once asked her, “Gosh, mom, why are you doing so much?” Well, after she had just won a trip again somewhere, she’s like, “Well, if I make a sale, the first thing I ask myself is, where’s the next one coming from?”

And I have seen some of my male counterparts say, “Ah, I just made a sale. Let’s go and have a beer and celebrate.” So she always said that women immediately go after and look for the next sale, where she thought men like to go out and have a beer first and then start looking for the next one.

Adam Honig: Well, it wouldn’t be very politically correct of me to correct that. There are differences between men and women, but let’s just say there might be.

Paula Gamer: There might be.

Adam Honig: Yes, there might be. But it’s super interesting, Paula, because, like a lot of people have come on the podcast, we’ve talked a lot about the labor market and the desire to hire people and how difficult it is, but I don’t think anybody has ever really singled out this kind of back-to-work post-childhood area. And I just wonder how much people are missing out by not having programs or specifically looking for reentry—women who are ready to reenter the workforce in that way.

Paula Gamer: I don’t think anyone is looking at it, and I’m specifically like, if someone has a 4 or 5 year gap on their resume, I’ve had other managers say, “Oh, where were they for 4 or 5 years?” and just want to push the resume off. And I’m like, “No, otherwise this person looks pretty good. Let’s see what the explanation for that was.”

A lot of times, it is. I left the workforce to raise children, and I try not to let that cloud our vision. Now, not every manager may feel that way, but I would encourage all employers to find out why they left the workforce for a period of time and see if you can’t figure out a way to get them back in.

Adam Honig: Yeah, I think that’s really good advice. And like we were talking about, they were probably doing a harder job than whatever else it is that we’re needing them to be doing.

Paula Gamer: Absolutely.

Adam Honig: Well. Paula, it’s been super to have you on the podcast. You’re such an enthusiastic guest; I love that. I love hearing about all the packaging stuff. We could talk about that for hours, I suspect. It’s fascinating stuff.

Paula Gamer: There’s nothing more fun. It is so fun to walk into Target or a liquor store and say, “Oh, we did that. We did that.” And sometimes you can look at the bottom and see our G logo. It’s just fun.

Adam Honig: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast.

Paula Gamer: Thank you for having me, Adam. It was a pleasure. 

Adam Honig: So as a reminder for all of our listeners, you can find every episode of the “Make it. Move it. Sell It” podcast at Spiro.ai/podcast. And I don’t know, Paula, what do you think people should give us, like, a good review for this episode?

Paula Gamer: Give us a thumbs up.

Adam Honig: Thumbs up. We definitely want a five-star review from all of our listeners. Just for Paula, not for me, but Hey everybody, thanks for tuning in. And we look forward to the next episode. 

Paula Gamer: Thanks, Adam.