2020-2023 Editorial Advisory Board: Meet New Board Member Kelly Kasner

The next member of our new Editorial Advisory Board is Kelly Kasner. Kelly brings a marketing and advertising background to the board. She grew up in a family-owned injection moldmaking business working across all aspects of the business, including financial, operations, human resources, marketing and sales. She holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration with minors in marketing and advertising from Western Michigan University.

Upon the retirement of her parent’s company in 2015, she was director of sales and marketing. After a few years in the non-profit world advocating for the skilled trades industries, Kelly came on board with her ‘second family’ at Michiana Global Mold (MGM), where many team members have a history of working at her family’s shop.

Kelly Kasner is currently Michiana Global Mold’s director of sales & marketing. She manages overall strategic and operational marketing and customer relationships.

Michiana is a designer and builder of plastic and rubber injection molds for the automotive, medical, industrial, and consumer products industries located in Mishawaka, Indiana. The shop specializes in parts with Class A finishes, highly complex and multi-material. MGM’s cross-functional design and engineering team works in collaboration with the certified journeyman mold makers to build single to high-cavitation molds of tight-tolerance parts, including hot/cold runner, collapsible core, insert, overmold, shuttle, stack, unscrewing, two-shot and rotational; as well as forging and foundry dies. MGM’s China partnership allows the company to bring in both fully and semi-finished molds fully backed and managed by the U.S. team.

Kelly is currently MGM’s director of sales & marketing. She manages overall strategic and operational marketing and customer relationship activities and fosters customer relationships into partnerships that provide manufacturing solutions.

When it comes to working outside of MGM facilities, Kelly serves as the active director of the board and chapter executive for the local Michiana Chapter National Tooling and Machining Association (MCNTMA), engaging and participating in workforce development and training, manufacturing workplace culture, advocacy, business development and local economic development. She also is the development and support coordinator of the Manufacturing Advancement Program — MCNTMA’s partnership with Goodwill Industries to address the skills gap and workforce development challenges of the community — an active support coordinator for the community’s annual MFG Day and a member of Women in Manufacturing (WiM).

Kelly is looking forward to discussing challenges and solutions involving business development, culture, training/workforce development, succession planning, strategic planning, and sales and marketing. She is also excited to learn from the experience of the other board members in terms of technology advances in mold design and construction, and molding, as well as to advance her ‘manufacturing enthusiast’ efforts for promoting the impact of our industry, prosperous career paths, apprenticeships and success stories of small family-owned businesses.

Kelly lives in the South Bend metro area, where she enjoys gardening, reading and bird watching. Having Canadian family roots, she also enjoys being the biggest fan of her teenage son playing hockey and lacrosse.