🔒Perkins’ customer focus aims to boost Henkel brand

When Jerry Perkins, president of Henkel North America, is on an airplane — which is often — passengers typically respond, “Oh, yeah, the knife company,” when he says where he works.

That would be J.A. Henckels, not Henkel.

“Henkel, as big as we are — [with] a lot of really great brands like Dial and Purex and hair-care products like göt2b that a lot of young people know and then our industrial brands like Loctite — the company itself is not very well known,” Perkins said.

It's one focus of his to change that. When hiring top employees, for example, name recognition is important, he said.

Globally, Henkel has almost 50,000 employees and $21.8 billion in sales among its adhesive technologies, laundry and home care, and beauty care units, with North America comprising about $3.9 billion in sales and 6,200 employees at 51 facilities. Henkel is based in Düsseldorf, Germany, but its North American headquarters is Rocky Hill, where the company employs about 500 people, many of them engineers and scientists in the adhesives division. Perkins has overseen the adhesives business globally since April 2013 as corporate senior vice president, global head of general industry and the Americas, adding duties as president North America in July.

The adhesives division has a strong tie to Connecticut with Loctite's founding here in the 1950s. The division was also the link to Henkel for Perkins, who was a senior leader in Loctite when Henkel acquired it in 1997.

“It was a good thing for the company and it was a great thing for the Loctite brand and … turned out to be a very good thing for me and a lot of my colleagues because we became part of a much larger global organization with the resources that we could take advantage of,” he said.

It's a dream environment for Perkins, 55, born and raised in Old Saybrook and a graduate of Central Connecticut State University in business administration and finance. Many peers entered insurance and banking.

“I wanted desperately to go to a company that made things,” he said.

He thought he might end up a CFO somewhere, but landed roles in sales and marketing, which he found intriguing. He started his career at Connecticut Natural Gas, overseeing its customer-service group, dispatch and vehicle and equipment fleet, which was involved in pipeline construction.

He was recruited as global director of sales and marketing for Pratt & Whitney Co. Inc. (not the jet-engine maker), which made highly engineered machine tools for the auto and aerospace industries and high-performance measurement systems for manufacturing globally, a dream position fitting Perkins' manufacturing interests. In the early '90s, he was recruited as a director of product management at Loctite.

With adhesives ubiquitous in products throughout the world — from packaging to electronics, furniture, automobiles and more — Henkel is a vital part of manufacturing, including helping companies design and test parts using adhesives, Perkins said.

Simon Mawson, head of general industry North America and Latin America north and global head of the industrial assembly steering unit within adhesives, said Perkins is an engaging, empowering leader and excellent at making complex topics understandable.

“He's very customer-centric,” Mawson said. “The customer is always in the discussion.”

That focus is vital, Perkins said.

“I spend an awful lot of time making sure that we are constantly challenging ourselves to say, 'What is our customer thinking? What are they telling us? Where are they going? What are their problems?' And it's almost the beginning of most of our most important discussions about business strategy,” he said.

Perkins also is a humble leader with an easygoing demeanor, Mawson said.

“I think any senior leader that lets it get to their head what their business card says their title is, is fooling themselves,” Perkins said.

He and his wife, Barbara, have five children, 13 to 22, with one working, one in college and three at home. Perkins cherishes family time and, as an avid skier, finds mountains good places to bond.

“The long chairlift rides to the top are really great opportunities for connecting with the kids because there's nowhere they can go and I take full advantage,” he said with a chuckle.