Endeavor Fellow Mariel Petric – Leading with Purpose, A Vision for Sustainable Growth
Endeavor Romania Fellows are role models for our young entrepreneurs and are critical to the development of our entrepreneurial ecosystem. They are well rounded entrepreneurs, business professionals or thought leaders, whose experience and expertise are relevant to the needs of early stage startup founders. The Fellows personify our values — they dream big, are generous with their time and connections, and contribute to our network.
Mariel Petric is a prolific entrepreneur, founder of KangooPack, who has pioneered solutions in the packaging industry that prioritize efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and environmental responsibility. Mariel is also deeply committed to contributing to Romania’s growing entrepreneurial ecosystem. He actively supports the development of a business culture that embraces risk, learning from failure, and the courage to innovate, making him a role model for emerging entrepreneurs in Romania and beyond.
Tell us about your professional journey.
Initially, I started as an employee, from which perspective I had a complete and rather significant experience, going from being employed in a public institution to shifting the view working in the private sector, in a multinational, and then transitioning to entrepreneurship. At the time, I thought I wanted to be my own boss, but since then I realized that entrepreneurship isn’t about being a boss; in many situations, you have a huge responsibility towards your colleagues, the people who believe in you and who are significantly influenced by your every strategic decision.
What is your approach to leadership, and how do you inspire your team to stay motivated?
I strongly believe in being a leader rather than a boss. Sometimes I feel it’s important to also be a manager, by which I mean to activate management functions, especially control—not in a rigorous, policing sense of sanctioning, but in the sense of checks and balances, of understanding if we’re on the right track so that we can leverage insights to stay on the right path.
What does the right path look like?
It’s the one you set through your strategy, aiming to respect the initial plan for development or reorganization, restructuring, pivoting, but while also making sure that you stay within the range you envisioned. Here, it’s essential to have great flexibility to consider environmental factors that might come up; it’s entirely difficult borderlining on the impossible to make a stiff five-year strategy and stick to it because there’s a lot of volatility in our market. That’s why monitoring progress helps us maintain control over direction.
Kangoopack has a strong focus on sustainability. How does this influence your product development and business strategy?
We’re on a very good path, seeing an increasing focus from companies on sustainability, which we strongly believe in. We try to help companies consume as little packaging as they can, which we try to produce using as much recycled material as possible in an attempt to also reduce waste. It might sound a little counterintuitive, but being honest and upfront with our customers and their needs is what got us this far.
Why KangooPack?
I’d like to say that we conducted thorough research and analyzed this need in detail, but that’s not the case. The idea took shape when I observed this trend that was starting to take off in Western Europe in terms of consumer behavior: 20 years ago in Romania, people would buy a sack of onions, a sack of carrots, and a sack of potatoes. Gradually, we started buying individually packaged products in trays, and those sacks turned into 200 trays, and perhaps even more packaging if we consider individual orders made at home.
Convenience and comfort, as well as cost and time efficiency in big cities, led to the emergence of home delivery services, and we’re looking at ways to make this process sustainable—we help large companies optimize their costs. It all started with this momentary inspiration when I realized that this behavior would reach us eventually, and so in 2013 I opened this business to build a direction that adds real value.
How did you differentiate yourselves?
From the very beginning, we focused on the primary need of the client, which we translated into a cost, trying to explain that price and cost are two different things. This philosophy of analyzing packaging costs helped at the start, then we began selling a completely different product in the most cost-efficient way. Later, we discovered the need for market education, and we met this need by providing high-performance packaging equipment, with packaging featuring good technical characteristics, to achieve the lowest possible cost per unit of packaged product.
What have been some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced while scaling Kangoopack, and how did you overcome them?
In our interactions with clients, certain departments and decision-makers have a different perspective, and it’s a huge challenge to make purchasing departments understand the total cost and the value of this cost improvement versus price. It’s also important to have clients who want to improve their processes and who are willing to take responsibility for the sake of growth.
We also faced internal challenges because, as we grew and needed new people, they had to be introduced to our philosophy and approach. But we accepted that we are different, that we have a leading position in the local market, and that this comes with the responsibility to educate.
How do you think that high-impact entrepreneurs can contribute to the development of emerging markets like Romania?
There are multiple opportunities in Romania because there are many unmet needs, so courage and willingness to work to make things happen are necessary.
The business ecosystem is still just taking off; it’s not mature yet, and because it’s still in this formative process it’s malleable, so there’s room for innovation. We can have a clear impact on the development of our business ecosystem, and I believe we also have a duty to actively contribute to a culture of risk, mistakes, and the courage to give your idea a shot.
How are we doing with a culture of courage?
There’s a lot of room for growth because we’re the products of a culture that taught us to stigmatize mistakes, but it’s important to have the drive to make mistakes anyway and learn from them despite knowing better. Of course, it’s ideal to learn from others’ mistakes, but that’s also more difficult depending on the industry you’re in.
But we’re already learning through communities and initiatives that catalyze the ecosystem, from mentors and entrepreneurs who are willing to put their vulnerabilities on the table for the sake of creating a teachable moment and to openly discuss them for the benefit of those just starting out.
What piece of advice would you give to entrepreneurs in Romania or other developing markets who are looking to scale their businesses globally?
Keep asking yourself what sets you apart, what your target customer looks like, and how they make decisions. Until you put yourself in the customer’s shoes at every step of the process, you won’t have a functional product.
How do you stay motivated throughout this entire journey?
As an entrepreneur, I have this drive to build, entrepreneurs are a courageous and sometimes reckless type of breed, who would end up not doing anything if they stopped to consider all the risks. Internal motivation differs from person to person, but what helps along the way are small successes, incremental milestones that give you the energy to keep going.
Was there any decisive moment in your entrepreneurial journey that had a huge impact on your career path?
I think there are multiple moments you perceive intensely, but there are also times you don’t perceive as intense a decision that might turn out to have been important down the road. Even when you realize you made a mistake, you must keep yourself grounded, constantly open and flexible. The brain doesn’t like change, which means that being open to change and willing to re-analyze your beliefs is essential.
What attracts you to Endeavor Romania’s mission?
The fact that it supports the creation and growth of new, innovative companies capable of scaling internationally and creating added value to the Romanian ecosystem. Every large company, whether it’s a unicorn, a soonicorn or just a successful scale-up generates a multiplier effect, and a huge potential gain for Romania’s business ecosystem.