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Moving your North American headquarters across the country - and consolidating some 425 employees from three different bases - is no small feat. But according to Achim Kempf, vice president of integration at consumer goods multinational Henkel, the effort has been fairly seamless.
"First you had two cultures coming together," Kempf said at Henkel's new North American Consumer Goods headquarters at 200 Elm St. in Stamford. "About one-third are existing employees who made the move from (former headquarters Scottsdale, Arizona) and a third are from Sun Products," the Wilton laundry and home-care items company that Henkel acquired last year for $3.6 billion.
The third component is new hires, which Kempf said amount to around 260 across its different divisions, which include beauty care R&D, human resources, finance, legal, IT, purchasing and corporate communications.
Despite "a couple of headaches," Kempf said that the disparate groups have quickly become used to working together as a single unit. "At the end of the day it was fairly simple."
The German company has taken over three floors totaling 155,000 square feet at the BLT Financial Centre. The first floor is dedicated to beauty care R&D, which when completed will encompass a laboratory for the development and clinical testing of such products as Dial soap, Right Guard antiperspirant/deodorant, Schwarzkopf hair care and göt2b styling products.
The area will also include a learning center to develop and test product formulations and product packaging, a clinical testing facility and a "hair learning" salon; consumers will be offered the opportunity to participate in product trials and focus groups, according to Senior Vice President of Human Resources Gretchen Crist.
That area is planned to open by the end of the...