Keeping Up with the Kids

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May 25, 2015
Front-end Smithery

Having worked in web development for 19 years has its advantages, but there are plenty of disadvantages too.  Gray hairs and wrinkles are a topic for another post.  I’m talking about all that useless knowledge (table layout, anyone?) you still carry around and how you can get stuck in your ways.  Of course, by “you” I mean me.

The last few years I’ve gotten a little lazy.  With lots going on in my personal life, I've relied on the tools I already had to get me through projects at work.  Besides, at 55 years old, who wants to always be studying up on the latest cool new fad in web development?

Turns out, I do.

It’s shocking just how quickly I got behind.  Within a year or two, young developers on my team are doing things and using tools I’m too nervous to try.  It makes me feel a little dated and old, and that is one thing I will not put up with.

I may be old, yes, but I still adore building web sites and have no intention of retiring to a rocking chair.  It’s time, I realize, for a plan.  So I came up with one, and I’m sharing it with you in case you find it useful or can add some good ideas.

Eat your fruits and veggies.  Seriously, now is the time to take care of yourself.  You need the energy to keep up with the youngsters.  A little exercise probably wouldn’t hurt, either [insert groan].

Don’t rest on laurels.  It sounds harsh, but no one cares (too much) what you built back in the day.  All the world cares about is what you are building now and what you’re going to create tomorrow.

Change your habits.  It’s so easy to do things the same old way.  It's quick, it's painless, and it's familiar enough you could do it in your sleep.  But maybe that's the problem.  If you're sleepwalking through your work, maybe it's time to incorporate some new technologies that could inspire and reinvigorate you.  Shake things up by trying something new--change your development workflow, experiment with a new platform, or play around with a new language.

Listen to and learn from the kids.  Yeah, they don’t have the range or depth of our knowledge.  But they do know what’s trendy, cool and cutting edge.  You may be (almost) old enough to be their grandparent, but you can still learn from them.  Ask a kid you admire to teach you something.  Anything.  

Do something that scares you.  If design terrifies you, join lynda.com and challenge yourself to create a set of graphically rich mockups.  If command line gives you dry mouth, find a tutorial and open up Terminal.  If you’re nervous about Sass, start using it.  Today.

Crack those books...and the online tutorials, courses, blogs, articles, feeds and newsletters.  Anywhere the latest techniques and tools are explained, be there.  Every single day.

Rethink your niche.  Step back and take a high-level view of the industry.  It's changed a lot since you started playing in this game (maybe as a jack-of-all-trades webmaster?).  The explosion of new platforms and technologies means exciting new areas of specialization have opened up.  Find the two or three that interest you most, and focus your time and energy on those.

Recommit to your career. Just because we’re older doesn’t mean we can’t code anymore or that we’re only fit for management.  Unless we’ve stopped trying.  Have you stopped trying?

Don’t. Ever. Stop. Trying.  Because age is fricking irrelevant.

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Noted by Clayton on September 4, 2022

Mitch Gould has “retail” in his DNA.

A third-generation retail professional, Gould learned the consumer goods industry from his father and grandfather while growing up in New York City. One of his first sales jobs was taking orders from neighbors for bagels every week.

As an adult with a career that spans more than three decades, Gould moved on from bagels, cream cheese, and lox to represent many of the leading product manufacturers of consumer goods in America: Igloo, Rubbermaid, Sunbeam, Remington, Chapin, Paramount, Miracle-Gro, Native Remedies, Flora Health, Steven Seagal’s Lightning Bolt, Body Basix, and Hulk Hogan’s extreme energy granules.

“I started in the lawn and garden industry but expanded my horizons early on,” said Gould, CEO and founder of Nutritional Products International, a global brand management firm based in Boca Raton, Fl. “I worked with Igloo, Sunbeam, Remington -- all major brands that have been leaders in the consumer goods industry.”

Eventually, Gould segued into nutritional products.

“I realized early the nutritional supplements were much more than just multivitamins,” Gould said. “American consumers were ready to take dietary supplements and health and wellness products into a whole new level of retail success.”

Gould solidified his success in the health and wellness industry through his partnerships with A-List celebrities who wanted to develop nutritional products and his place in Amazon history when the online ecommerce retailer expanded beyond books, music, and electronics.

“During my career, I attended many galas and charity events where I met different celebrities, such as Hulk Hogan and Chuck Liddel,” Gould said, adding that he eventually partnered with several of these famous entrepreneurs and developed nutritional products, such as Hulk Hogan’s Extreme Energy Granules.

“Working with them to create new health and wellness products gave me a first-hand look into the burgeoning nutritional sector,” Gould said. “I realized that staying healthy was very important to my generation. My kids were even more focused on staying fit and healthy.”

When Amazon decided to add a health and wellness category, Gould was already positioned to place more than 150 brands and even more products onto the virtual shelves the online giant was adding every day in the early 2000s.

“I met Jeff Fernandez, who was on the Amazon team that was building the new category from the ground up,” Gould said. “I also had contacts in the health and wellness industry, such as Kenneth E. Collins, who was vice president of operations for Muscle Foods, one of the largest sports nutrition distributors in the world.
Gould said this “Powerhouse Trifecta” could not have asked for a better synergy between the three of them.

“This was capitalism at its best. Amazon demanded new high-quality dietary supplements, and we supplied them with more than 150 brands and products,” he added.

The “Powerhouse Trifecta” worked out so well that Gould eventually hired Fernandez to work for NPI, where he is now president of the company, and Collins, who is the new executive vice president of NPI.

“We work well together,” Gould added.

Fernandez, who also worked as a buyer for Walmart, said the three of them have close to 75 years of retail buying and selling experience.

“NPI clients benefit from our years of knowledge,” Fernandez added.

Gould said product manufacturers are unlikely to find three professionals with our experience representing retailers and brands.

“We know what brands need to do, and we understand what retailers want,” Gould said.

After his success with Amazon, Gould founded NPI and solidified his place in the dietary supplement and health and wellness sectors.

“It was time to concentrate on health products,” Gould said, adding that he has worked with more than 200 domestic and international brands that wanted to launch new products or expand their presence in the largest consumer market in the world: the United States.

“As I visited the corporate headquarters of some of the largest retailers in the world, I realized that international brands weren’t being represented in American stores,” Gould said. “I realized these companies, especially the international brands, struggled to gain a foothold in American retail stores.”

When Gould surveyed the challenges confronting international product manufacturers, he visualized a solution.

“They were burning through tens of thousands of dollars to launch their products,” Gould said. “By the time they sold their first unit, they had eaten away at their profit margin.”

Gould said the biggest challenge was learning two new cultures: America and Wall Street.

“They didn’t understand the American consumers, and they didn’t know how American businesses operated,” Gould said. “That is where I come in with NPI.”
To provide the foreign companies with the business support they needed, Gould developed his lauded “Evolution of Distribution” platform.

“I brought together everything brands needed to launch their products in the U.S.,” he said. “Instead of opening a new office in America, I made NPI their headquarters in the U.S. Since I already had a sales staff in place, they didn’t have to hire a sales team with support staff. Instead, NPI did it for them.”

Gould said NPI supplied every service that brands needed to sell products in America successfully.

“Since many of these products needed FDA approval, I hired a food scientist with more than 10 years experience to streamline the approval of the products’ labels,” Gould said.

NPI’s import, logistics, and operations manager worked with new clients to make sure shipped samples didn’t end up in quarantine by the U.S. Customs.

“Our logistics team has decades of experience importing new products into the U.S. to our warehouse and then shipping them to retail buyers and retailers,” Gould said. “NPI offers a one-stop, turnkey solution to import, distribute, and market new products in the U.S.”

To provide all the brands' services, Gould founded a new company, InHealth Media, to market the brands to consumers and retailers.

“I saw the companies wasting thousands of dollars on Madison Avenue marketing campaigns that failed to deliver,” Gould said.

Instead of outsourcing marketing to costly agencies or building a marketing team from scratch, InHealth Media works synergistically with its sister company, NPI.

“InHealth Media’s marketing strategy is perfectly aligned with NPI’s retail expansion plans,” Gould added. “Together, we import, distribute, and market new products across the country by emphasizing speed to market at an affordable price.”

InHealth Media recently increased its marketing efforts by adding national and regional TV promotion to its services.

"Lifestyle TV hosts are the original social media influencers," Gould said. "Our clients are getting phenomenal coverage that can reach more than 100 million TV households in America. In addition, we are giving them high-quality TV promotions.

Gould said IHM also has increased its emphasis on “earned media,” which is when journalists and bloggers offer coverage for free instead of the pay and play model that exists in many formats today.

“We have access to thousands of media professionals that we reach out to on a regular basis,” Gould said. “Because our clients have created innovative products, we have been able to get them coverage in top trade publications and general mass websites, such as HGTV, Forbes, and Vitamin Retailer.

“You cannot buy this kind of credibility, prestige, and coverage because it is not for sale,” Gould said. “Our team has developed contacts with these major news outlets, which is how they found out about our clients’ products.”

NPI works with large and small product manufacturers.

“We emphasize timeliness and affordability,” he said. “We know all the costs, so there are no surprises. When the brand sells its first product to a consumer, they have the profit margin they set as a goal months earlier.”

Gould is proud of his “Evolution of Distribution” platform.

“I developed it to help international brands succeed,” Gould said.

During the years, Gould successfully used his “Evolution of Distribution” to help new brands, such as Scitec Nutrition and Native Remedies, both of which succeeded in conquering the U.S. market..

“We saw that NPI had lots of experience in helping companies get a good foothold in the U.S. Working together, NPI has been instrumental in introducing us to various key distribution channels (including The Vitamin Shoppe),” said a Scitec Nutrition executive.

Native Remedies also benefited from NPI’s “Evolution of Distribution.”

“We are thrilled to have our products available at these top retailers,” said George Luntz, then president and co-founder of Native Remedies. “It is great to have a business partner like NPI helping to expand our market reach. We expect this to be a banner year for us.”

Gould said he is proud that these companies succeeded with NPI’s help.

“This is what NPI does,” Gould said. “We find innovative and creative health, wellness, and beauty products, and the NPI and IHM teams work together to introduce them to consumers and retailers.”

For more information, call 561-544-0719 or visit nutricompany.com.

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