The Kula Ring PodcastThe Kula Ring Podcast

Inbolt’s AI vision guidance now steers 200+ robots across 100+ factories at Stellantis, Toyota, Ford, and GM, and Carl Standertskjold runs the entire marketing function alone. He joins Jeff and Carman to talk about what changes when a startup shifts from landing first logos to expanding inside a plant, and how a team of one holds up under it. Carl builds every plan down from the business outcome, leans on an AI-first stack, and still draws a hard line where human judgment and creativity can’t be handed off. The conversation explores the two roles he’s hiring, why systems thinking separates the marketers who thrive, and where real buyers actually spend their time.

Josue Vermes took a winding path—high-end wine, JPMorgan, Amazon apparel at HanesBrands—before landing as the most senior marketer at Carolina Handling, a Raymond forklift dealer expanding into intralogistics. In this episode he makes the case for borrowing B2C discipline without abandoning B2B fundamentals: geotargeted paid media, streaming TV built around football season, a video-first podcast, and a TikTok channel his own leadership questioned. The throughline is counterintuitive: broad, low-intent reach and a genuine brand personality aren’t a distraction from pipeline—they’re part of the growth strategy when your buyers are younger than you’d expect and educating themselves on channels most manufacturers refuse to touch.

Maria Birdwell came to industrial packaging from media and advertising, with no B2B background and no allegiance to how the category has always sold itself. At Franklin Mountain Packaging, a corrugated manufacturer that started up in 2022, she markets a young company against multi-generational competitors by refusing to fight on age or even on machinery. Instead she lets customer requirements drive the conversation and, in a recent pivot she credits directly to macroeconomic uncertainty, leans the whole message toward flexibility. She tells Jeff White and Carman Pirie why she downplays sustainability, why video of machines in action outperforms everything, and why marketing means nothing if operations can’t capture and convert the lead.

Benjamin Toomey didn’t come to additive manufacturing from engineering — he came from fireworks and craft beer. That outsider’s vantage turns out to be the point. In this episode, Ben tells Jeff White and Carman Pirie how he went from feeling like an alien at his first trade show to becoming a “messenger” who can connect large-format 3D printing to a stranger’s field of interest. Along the way he makes the case that marketing complex technology isn’t about being the smartest person in the room or hiding what you don’t know — it’s about building a common language, grounding claims in data, and keeping the divergent outside interests that let a marketer connect dots the engineers can’t.

Chris Persson sells something buyers never see: polypropylene fiber woven into cars, couches, and carpets. On this episode he unpacks the peculiar challenge of marketing an ingredient brand with a guerrilla-sized budget, and why the sustainability pitch keeps colliding with a price tag. His answer is a reframe he calls “sustainability plus one” — lead with a greener story, then stack innovation, cleanability, and low specific gravity on top so the customer never has to choose good over cheap. Along the way he makes the case that a manufacturer’s deepest competitive moat isn’t its equipment but the decades of intellectual property walking around on its factory floor.