Her Story
About Carrie
I've been in contract manufacturing for about 16-17 years, all within the beauty industry. I started at 220 Laboratories here in Southern California, where we specialized in aerosols and non-aerosols, skincare, and predominantly hair care. I began in the operations group and customer service, and they gave me the opportunity to explore project management, which is really where my career kicked off. I was always drawn to manufacturing - I really like learning about the robotics and the automations and that aspect of manufacturing. I'm a very process-driven individual, so project management has always been my calling. Currently, I'm a senior account manager at McKenna Labs, where I primarily do R&D development with the brands we work with - what we call project onboarding or NPD work. I'm the liaison with our R&D teams and maintain timelines to make sure all the departments are on track with task management, while guiding customers to make better and more cost-efficient decisions when they go to launch a new product. One of my most notable achievements was developing an onboarding process that brought down lead times from 90-120 days to about 14-21 days, which helped us keep our Bath and Body Works business at a $35 million account. McKenna Labs actually hired me specifically to develop their onboarding process.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Carrie
01What do you attribute your success to?
I think I'm just really well organized, and I really try to always have really calming presentations, so that my customers feel like a sense of relief when they speak to me. I think working on launches is just so stressful in general that it's like a breath of fresh air when somebody can walk into a project and just have a calming demeanor, and so that's kind of what I try to be for the brands that we work with.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best advice has probably been to really trust my gut. I mean, there are hundreds of circumstances that I've been put in, but every launch is different in their own way, but it's the same in a lot of ways. With the experience, a lot of my mentors have instilled a lot of confidence in me by just telling me, yeah, you need to follow your gut on this. So I'd say to follow my gut, follow my instinct, based on my experience.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would tell them that it's so much fun. That working with beauty brands is stressful, but it's also really exciting, because you get to be a part of a lot of work that a lot of brands put into innovation and really pushing the limits of what beauty standards are. I'd say it's a lot of fun, and that it's actually a lot of gratification when you really get to collaborate with a really great group of people and have a really good team behind you.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I think it's the industry in general. I think that it's a very high-demand, fast-paced sort of market, where a lot of brands are trying to - something goes viral, or something seems to trend online, and then the brands, subsequent brands, try to kind of get onto that bandwagon, and so it's a very fast-pacing, very complex project to manage. So that is probably the most challenging. I've been in this field for 17 years, but I never stop learning.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
I think prioritizing would be probably my number one value. I'm also a mother, I own my own home, and I think prioritizing is always so key to my day-to-day life, as well as my daily work tasks, my home tasks. I think prioritization is really underrated but also difficult to manage. But collaboration is also really high on my list. I really love and enjoy collaboration, so being able to do that really makes my work gratifying.
Join Influential Women and start making an impact. Register now.