Steve Misner

 

In early 1990, I took a job with Colgate-Palmolive and moved from Detroit to work in Manhattan and live in Connecticut.  It was a great career move.  It was a great adventure for me and my family. 

I loved Colgate, my tenure there was seventeen years.  It was the by far, the longest I had worked anywhere.  There was business and professional growth and challenges.  The consumer products culture of this venerable old country was both refreshing and frustrating to navigate at the same time.  As is the case with anyplace I have ever worked, it is the people that make it more meaningful and memorable.  I had the opportunity to meet, work, and become friends with some excellent people.

One of best was Steve Misner.  He was a soap manufacturing engineer.  He dedicated his life to mastering the art of bar soap manufacturing.  He was keenly interested in the reason I moved to Colgate; to join the newly formed Total Quality Group.  I want to say I met Steve the first month I was there.  He was keenly interested in learning more about Quality Management and Assurance.   I was happy to share what I knew.  In turn, he educated me in process of soap making:  raw ingredients, saponification, extrusion, cutting and stamping, packaging, and distribution.  I learned about the grades of tallow and the not so pleasing odors the lower grades had requiring the need to use more fragrance (the most important ingredient) to mask the tallow and get the soap to get the soap to smell as it should.  I learned about the batch and continuous saponification methods. 

 Steve is one of the nicest fellows you could ever want to meet, and we reconnected last week through the magic of LinkedIn.  We had a phone conversation and even though we haven’t spoken in at least fifteen years, it was as if we didn’t miss a beat.  His passion for soap has followed him into retirement.  He and colleague started a boutique soap company, Stone Clean Soap.  They have, between them, seventy years of experience in the business and have developed formulas and processes that are the standards in soap manufacturing. 

     Steve sent me a sample that arrived just today.  The product is really good.  The fragrances are sublime.  The lathering and feel while washing and then upon rinsing are superb.  But I would have not expected any less than this from this excellent and caring engineer.  I am delighted to see that quality is a central to their company.  Steve credits that to my influence way back when we first met.  I might have provided a wee bit of guidance back then, but Steve was a very quick study and ran with it.  I am delighted how he has embodied the philosophy and applied it very nicely in his little company. 

The most amazing thing about Steve, to me, is that he never expressed a desire to do more than what he was doing when I first met him.  He loved to engineer and innovate manufacturing practices.  He was doing what he loved and was dedicated to it his entire career.  Corporate gossip, intrigue, maneuvering, and all that were never for him.  I truly admired this about him.  It took me an entire career to be where I want to be, teaching at a university.  He was doing it from day one.  That makes him a very successful and a very rich man in my book.

Check out their products, you won’t disappointed.