IB Woman
Issue No. 24 - August/September 2005
Packaging up the family business
Sascha Detmold
by Penelope Herbert
Starting a business is challenging enough, but consider the pressure on a third generation family member taking over a business that has been iconic for over fifty years. Sascha Detmold Cox has never known a time when her family was not deeply committed to building the Detmold Packaging Group. Specialist converters of paper and board based products, the Adelaide-based, privately owned company has six main divisions and multiple offices and factories throughout Australia, New Zealand and Asia making the Detmold Packaging Group one of the largest manufacturers of paper packaging products in the Asia-Pacific.
“I did work in the business during school holidays but I never assumed I'd have a leading role,” says Sascha. “I was always more interested in languages and physiology.”
Whilst waiting for a University opening, and then once there, Sascha worked as a “general lackey” at Detmold running job bags to the factory floor and doing technical and manufacturing administration. She says there wasn't an overt expectation that she would eventually work in the company so after she graduated with a Business (Marketing) degree she headed overseas, travelled and at times worked as a Nanny.
Sub-consciously distancing herself from business, Sascha did not buy a return ticket to Australia instead spending her time in England, Germany and Italy. Returning to Adelaide in 1996, Sascha found that Detmold Group division, Paper-Pak, required someone to work in a marketing role. Created to sell innovative retail packaging solutions, Paper-Pak's National Manager was a creative young man named Nic Cox who interviewed Sascha without knowing who she was until just before the interview.
“This was my first 'proper' job and the first marketing role in the Detmold Group,” says Sascha, “so I was very aware that success would open the doors for marketing roles to be created in other divisions. Paper-Pak had no marketing resources, it had n...
