NutraWomen Wednesday: Petra Erlandson, Director of Sales and Marketing, Alkemist Labs
"I'm a chemist, and I come from the science side," said said. "For me, it's a perfect marriage of technical challenge, scientific discussions, interesting chemistry as well as the business and the marketing and sales side. I always knew I wanted to kind of join those things together. And being here nine years, I have to say that one of my favorite parts is the people I work with—the staff, my team, but also our clients. We work with some of the best people in the industry."
Erlandson is also very active in Women in Nutraceuticals (WIN) and secured Alkemist as a founding sponsor. She is a member of the WIN Science Committee as the marketing sub chair and also serves on the WIN Programming Committee as the awards chair. Equity has been top of mind for Erlandson ever since she can remember.
"I've kind of always been in the STEM side of things even after I transitioned to business," she said. "It started for me when I was in college. I went to a science school, and only 25% of the students there were female. So this kind of story of challenges for women particularly in STEM is like my life story."
Erlandson said everyone benefits when teams are diverse. Research suggests women help boost productivity, improve fairness and provoke collaboration.
"You really need a team that works well together, that's creative, that can problem-solve on the fly," said said. "My experience is that happens when you have a lot of diversity on the team. People with different functions seeing things differently. And so why would you want to cut out like half of the workforce by not including women? You're just cutting out maybe half of the creativity of your staff or half of the potential and something magical happens when the team is functioning well."
