Helen of Troy
Product Development Engineering and Program management
As Product Development Engineer, I managed multiple brands and types of hair tools from concept phase to production. This was my first experience working in the Beauty industry and I thoroughly enjoyed the environment and team that I was a part of. My responsibilities mainly consisted of:
Defining technical requirements
Schedule creation and management
Cross-functional collaboration with different departments and teams from both US and Asia Pacific
Prototyping and testing
Product optimization and risk management
Working at Helen of Troy allowed me to leverage the strengths of my mechanical engineering and product development backgrounds.
One of the biggest lessons I learned in Helen of Troy’s El Paso office was the impact and influence that strong synergy within a team can have on delivery and outcomes. This team had incredible trust, integrity, and devotion, which promoted pride and the highest quality in our product.
CURLING IRONS
The Hot Tools CurlStraight Styler is one of the most unique hair tools out on the market. This product combines the components of both a flat iron and curling iron to provide users versatility in how they utilize the tool. The challenge in this product was to implement heaters at an efficient cost without compromising quality. An LED display lets users know the iron’s temperature and the rotating knob allows for accurate control of the temperature.
FLAT IRONS
Using components and tooling from its predecessor, the Hot Tools Smoothwave Vibrating flat iron takes hair straightening to another level. This product integrates a vibrating motor with a sensor that causes the unit to vibrate as it glides down hair. In particular for this product, I ran multiple tests and collected dataset to define metrics that clearly communicated this iron’s benefits to the customers.
hair DRYERS
All hair dryers that I worked on at Helen of Troy were similar in their components and construction, however, there was one hair dryer that stood out. That was the Revlon Airflow Control hair dryer, which had an innovative rotating nozzle. A big achievement with this product was optimizing the internal design to reduce wear of its internal components due to the rotating nozzle feature.
PROCESS IMPROVEMENT
Towards the latter part of my time at Helen of Troy, I was chosen as the lead of a team of 10 product engineers to plan and develop a transition to Smartsheet as the project and documentation management platform for all departments. During this experience, I communicated closely with vendors and stakeholders from our organization to define requirements and use cases for the system. This required in depth understanding of multiple development processes to identify opportunities for standardization. My team developed process flows and helped set up virtual environments and templates to be used throughout HOT as well as planned and managed deployment of the new system.
VOLUNTEERING
While working at Helen of Troy I organized and participated in a number of volunteering events. As a close partner of the Humane Society of El Paso, my colleagues and I represented Helen of Troy by feeding dogs, spending time with them in their kennels, doing yard work and even painting with peanut butter on a canvas!
In August of 2023, we volunteered at HSEP the day before the 30th annual telethon by walking and bathing dogs to get them ready for their TV appearances. It was tiresome work but very much worth it. An especially rewarding experience was being able to make a donation while watching the cute Chihuahua named OJ, who I met the day before, smiling at me from the TV screen. He is a cutie.