Like a certain pink bunny, Rebecca Lane “Becchi” Oesterle, CPPL, just keeps going and going as an educational leader for packaging professionals, even in her retirement. Oesterle led the charge at Energizer on several package development and project management innovations and translated those same skills at Just Born Quality Confections. Currently, she brings over 40 years of packaging and project management experience as Chair of the Board of Directors at the Institute of Packaging Professionals (IoPP).
Born in Vermont and raised a “Navy brat,” Oesterle and her family followed her father as he was stationed all over the world, from Virginia and Rhode Island to Bermuda and Sicily. Despite the constant moving, she was mad when her father left the Navy after 21 years because, as the youngest child, she didn’t get to live as many places as her older brothers.
As a Georgia Tech undergrad, Oesterle interned at the Eveready Battery Company division of Union Carbide before segueing into a job as an industrial engineer at Energizer upon graduation. In addition to her B.S. in Management Science, she earned an M.B.A in Operations and Marketing at the Sage Colleges and an M.S. in Packaging Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She later became an industry advisory board member at RIT.
In the early 2000s, Energizer began focusing more on packaging and packaging development, leading Oesterle to earn a promotion from supply chain manager to manager of global packaging development.
She helped develop several innovative package designs for household products, including more accessible hearing aid battery packaging, a rollout of new graphics to fit the company’s global branding image, and a new child-proof plastic packaging for lithium coin batteries used to this day.
Not one to stop at just a few innovations, Oesterle also used her time in this role to expand Energizer’s Package Design Center, a program created by her colleague Dan Stucky. Oesterle grew the program to include all the “toys” needed to develop working package prototypes within 24 to 48 hours.
“It was partially to show off what the capabilities were,” Oesterle says, “especially when the Design Center first opened, so that [retailers] would know what we could do internally.” The Package Design Center grew from a local department to a global operation at Energizer.
Oesterle found yet another way to stay ahead of the times at Energizer by leading the development of an electronic workflow system. Her team considered outside data management services and would have relished a service like Specright, “but they weren’t around when we were first looking to do this,” she says. “Energizer had a really capable IT department, I mean, they were very, very good, and we designed our own system.”
