Context

Rehrig Pacific Company: a $600M manufacturer of reusable supply chain assets. Milk crates, bread trays, beverage shells, produce containers, trash carts. Found in every industry from aerospace to milk production with exception of apparel. A 100-year-old company with deep manufacturing expertise but no dedicated digital product function and no product management discipline.

I joined Rehrig in two chapters. First as Strategic Development National Manager (May 2013 through December 2014), owning B2B enterprise customer discovery, user research, and go-to-market strategy across 40+ industries. Then as Director of Innovation (December 2014 through December 2017), building the innovation capability and product operating model from scratch.

The progression from field intelligence to innovation lab to commercialized products follows a single thread: you cannot create value for customers if you do not understand the user’s actual workflow in the actual environment. The customer tells you what they want to buy. The user shows you what they actually need. The gap between those two inputs is where the product opportunities live, and you cannot see that gap from a conference room.

Challenge

Rehrig served every industry from aerospace to milk production with exception of apparel. The customer base spanned agriculture, pharmaceutical, petroleum, classified transport, poultry processing, dairy, convenience retail, big-box retail, automotive parts, and a dozen others. Each industry had different workflows, different environmental constraints, and different definitions of what “technology” meant for their operation.

The company had deep structured customer intelligence for its durable products. Sales teams had strong relationships with buyers and decades of understanding about how physical assets performed in the supply chain. What the company did not have was digital and operational intelligence: how field operators, warehouse workers, dock workers, and drivers actually interacted with technology in their daily work, what data their operations generated, and where digital products could create value that durable assets alone could not. The product development decisions for the emerging digital function were based on what customers requested, not on what users needed. These are different things. The buyer requests features. The user reveals workflows. The gap between requests and workflows is where the product opportunities live.

Approach

Phase 1: Field Intelligence at Scale (2013-2014)

I conducted 41 enterprise customer audits across 23 industries, spanning 96,000+ miles annually. These were structured field observations. I embedded with the customer’s operations team, walked their facilities, watched their workflows, documented their pain points, and connected what I saw to product investment decisions back at Rehrig.

The methodology was consistent across industries. Arrive on-site. Walk the facility end-to-end. Observe the workflow from receiving to shipping. Identify the moments where the operator’s process breaks down, slows down, or requires manual intervention. Document the physical environment: connectivity (often limited), temperature (often extreme), cleanliness (often challenging), and the tools the operator actually uses versus the tools they are supposed to use.

At Peco Foods (poultry processing, 7 sites across Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama), I combined the technical site audit with product requirements and discovery into a single 700-mile road trip in 2.5 days. The on-site investigation revealed the asset shortage was geographic, not managerial. Five sites within a 90-minute radius of each other masked shortages through informal transfers. The isolated Alabama site ran out regularly. That diagnostic insight led to a pay-per-use pricing model that generated 15% more revenue than the traditional replenishment model.

At a Fortune 500 retailer, the field observation revealed that their fully automated “dark” dairy facility needed edge computing for asset tracking that could operate without cloud connectivity. The Swisslog warehouse automation system needed clean, pre-processed RFID records in near-real-time, but the facility had problematic connectivity. The observation shaped the edge-first architecture I later designed for the system.

The field intelligence program shortened complex enterprise sales cycles 17% through direct customer discovery and prototype-led engagement. I improved product initiative accuracy 37% and reduced time-to-value 18% by connecting field observations directly to development priorities. These metrics come from comparing pre-initiative and post-initiative sales cycle duration and product launch success rates tracked internally.

The velocity mattered as much as the insight. The Peco Foods pay-per-use model went from field observation to pricing architecture to customer pilot within a single quarter. The consumer engagement platform went from a personal RF lab test to a working MVP on an expense budget to a live Minnesota pilot within months. The field intelligence did not accumulate in a report. It converted to product decisions on a cadence the company had never operated at before.

Phase 2: Innovation Lab Build (2014-2015)

The field intelligence created a backlog of product opportunities that the company had no infrastructure to pursue. I convinced senior leadership to expand from a basic open-air QA space (the original plan) to a 40K sq ft innovation center, including 10K sq ft of enclosed lab space that required permanently giving up contested warehouse territory.

This required buy-in from five functional leaders: corporate operations, warehousing, the local plant manager, finance, and sales. The warehouse space was revenue-generating storage. Giving it up for an innovation lab was a hard sell at a manufacturer where every square foot of factory and warehouse has a direct cost justification.

I authorized tenant improvement construction before formal budget approval from corporate. A top-5 customer visit was scheduled two months out, and the lab had to be functional by that date. I influenced a finance project manager to ensure the checks would clear, then signed off on permits and contracts personally.

I built the enclosed 10K sq ft lab for $105K, half the $210K estimate for enclosure alone. The savings came from vendor partnerships, repurposing existing equipment, acquiring used equipment, and producing the architectural plans myself. The lab included radio-shielded 40-foot walls, three at-grade dock doors, simulation environments for the four most common product contexts (shipping docks, racking systems, conveyors, lift trucks), four 10-by-10-foot anechoic mobile RF walls for testing, and a Maker Zone stocked with low-cost IoT hardware (Raspberry Pi, Particle Electron devices) replacing expensive single-use testing platforms.

I strategically co-located the center next to the sales training office and integrated ideation and discovery time into the sales training process. The facility served dual purpose: product development lab and customer demonstration environment. Customers who visited for sales training walked through the innovation center. The exposure generated new product conversations that the sales team had never been equipped to have.

The lab outlasted my tenure. It was renamed the Rehrig Innovation Showcase Experience and is still in operation.

Phase 3: Product Commercialization (2015-2017)

I recruited a cross-functional R&D team internally from engineering, data science, and product management. Founded the first product management discipline at the company. The technology portfolio spanned RFID, NFC, IoT, computer vision, edge computing, and cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud).

17 product concepts curated across agriculture, pharmaceutical, petroleum, classified transport, and logistics. All commercialized. All drove pull-through revenue on traditional durable assets, proving that digitally-enabled packaging was a net-new revenue stream, not a cost center.

The technology partner ecosystem I built included HID Global, ThinFilm, NXP, and MetalCraft for RFID and NFC components. I set up a personal RF lab in my garage during the NFC platform development because the company had no radio testing capability at the time. The testing validated tag read ranges, interference patterns, and UX considerations (increasing phone sizes plus no NFC Forum radio placement standards plus 1-inch read range equaled unreliable scanning) that shaped the product specification.

The concept-to-production cycle compressed 57% through the innovation lab infrastructure and the structured development process I established.

Outcome

22% technology adoption across Fortune 500 partners including Walmart, Coca-Cola, Safeway, Baxter Medical, AutoZone, and Phillips 66. This metric represents the proportion of Rehrig’s Fortune 500 customer base that adopted at least one digital product from the innovation portfolio during my tenure.

57% concept-to-production compression measured from ideation to first production shipment, comparing the pre-lab development timeline to the post-lab development timeline across comparable product complexity.

17 product concepts commercialized across agriculture, pharmaceutical, petroleum, classified transport, and logistics verticals.

15% revenue lift through the pay-per-use pricing model pilot at Peco Foods, measured against the traditional attrition-rate replenishment revenue model.

37% improvement in product initiative accuracy and 18% reduction in time-to-value measured by comparing pre-initiative and post-initiative product development success rates and launch timelines.

$105K lab build, 50% under the $210K estimate. 400% scope expansion from the original open-air QA space plan.

The innovation lab outlasted my tenure. Renamed the Rehrig Innovation Showcase Experience. The product management discipline I founded persists. The field discovery methodology I established continued to inform product investment decisions after my departure.

Lesson

The field is the strategy. The 96,000 miles per year were the product strategy. Every product concept that shipped came from a field observation. Every pricing model that worked came from understanding the customer’s physical environment and operational constraints at a level that a market research report cannot provide. Pay-per-use at Peco Foods. Technology-embedded packaging across Fortune 500 accounts. Edge computing at Walmart. All discovered in the field.

The second lesson: the innovation lab is a trust-building tool, not just a development environment. When a Fortune 500 customer walks through a facility with simulated dock environments, RFID test walls, and working prototypes, the conversation shifts from “can you do this?” to “when can we start?” The lab sold products that the sales team did not know how to sell.

The third lesson: build the lab for half the budget. The $105K build proved that innovation infrastructure does not require innovation-level spending. Repurposed equipment, vendor partnerships, and a willingness to produce your own architectural plans compress costs without compromising capability.

Technologies and standards referenced

  • RFID (UHF, HF, asset tracking and identification)
  • NFC (Near Field Communication, ISO 14443 / ISO 18092)
  • Edge computing (local processing for connectivity-constrained sites)
  • AWS and Google Cloud (cloud analytics platforms)
  • Raspberry Pi and Particle Electron (rapid prototyping IoT hardware)
  • Anechoic RF testing (radio-shielded measurement environments)
  • Swisslog (warehouse automation integration)
  • FDA food safety regulations (pharmaceutical supply chain)

About the author

Product executive. 15+ years building industrial AI platforms, B2B SaaS products, and connected smart device ecosystems in regulated industries across 100+ countries. Three portfolio turnarounds. Three org builds. Three times the methodology transferred, only the industries changed.

Nick builds at the hardware-software-data intersection. Industrial AI. Edge-to-cloud platforms. Workflow automation systems making 8,000+ decisions per workflow with zero cloud dependency. The career pattern: enter complex regulated environments, find the kill decisions others avoid, and redirect capital from legacy programs to products that ship and outlast him. The acquiring company kept his product. Threw away their own.

Most recently Head of Product at Digital Control Incorporated. Global product portfolio. Turnaround-to-growth. Previously at Zonar Systems, a subsidiary of $44B annual revenue Continental AG, leading a $70M connected device platform across three continents, and at Rehrig Pacific Company building an innovation function from scratch.

Leading global products and global teams as a Chief Product Officer, Head of Product, VP of Product for B2B and B2B2C companies for digital transformation and product growth leadership.

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