Vanderbilt Business

Author: Bonnie Ertelt

  • Working for Play: Erin Sullivan, MBA’04

    Working for Play: Erin Sullivan, MBA’04

    Would working at a toy company really be all fun and games? Erin Sullivan can tell you.

    She has worked at Mattel since landing a marketing internship while a student at Owen. Now senior director for Fisher-Price marketing, she has handled virtually every Mattel brand, except dolls, in her 11 years there.

    Erin_Sullivan
    Erin Sullivan

    “There are times when I’m at work, and I think I can’t believe I’m working, because I’m playing with a toy or playing games, and I’m doing it to see if it’s fun. You need to be able to see the world from a child’s point of view,” she says. “At the same time, it is a Fortune 500 company. There are stockholders and expectations, and the job definitely requires a mix of creativity and analytic ability.”

    Sullivan, who majored in political science at the University of Michigan, tried numerous occupations that helped her hone her interests to marketing before she arrived at Owen. When the time came for her internship, Mattel rose to the top of her list.

    “I wanted a big company that had a group of good marketers, because not having a marketing background, I wanted to learn from the people around me,” Sullivan says. Several Vanderbilt MBA alumni also worked at Mattel, so networking helped her land the internship. “It was a game changer.”

    It might surprise people to know she finds similarities in Owen and Mattel. “Both are collaborative. At Mattel, as a marketer working with design, finance and operations, I collaborate with people who don’t report to me and may have a lot more experience. I have to convince them to follow my lead,” she says. “It takes a good mix of humility, confidence and Type A passion. I saw that at Owen as well.”

    Sullivan has worked with some of Mattel’s best-known brands, including Hot Wheels; licensed action figures for Batman, Toy Story and Disney Pixar’s Cars and Planes; and created marketing strategy for games such as UNO, Scrabble and Pictionary. Now she is working with Fisher-Price preschool brands.

    A new mom, she is finding the Fisher-Price products she markets are the ones she prefers for her infant son. “It brings a whole new level of gratification to the work I do,” she says. “I can clearly see how they impact my child.”

    Sullivan says that while marketing fundamentals stay the same, there are differences in marketing techniques for different brands.

    “That’s what makes it fun,” she says. “That’s why I’ve been at Mattel for so long. It doesn’t get boring.”

  • Addicted to Travel

    Around the world in 80 days? Tyler Narveson needs only 17.

    The Colorado native, who finished his MBA in May, travels for both business and pleasure, calling his “addiction to travel” his passion. Having circumnavigated the earth five times already—at 28 years old—he was recently featured in an August Wall Street Journal article about the current popularity of round-the-world travel.

    “It was fun,” he says, “because I was doing a round-the-world trip the day it was published.”

    That trip’s first leg was to Finland, followed by Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Qatar, Bangladesh and China before he returned home. Using an American Airlines Explorer award, he pieced the trip together based on flights available through American’s flight alliances.

    “It was a bit much, to be honest,” he says. “It was just 2 1/2 weeks. The ones for work have usually been three to six weeks.”

    Before graduate work at Vanderbilt, Narveson worked for Accenture, a multinational consulting firm serving clients in more than 200 cities in 56 countries.

    “I did a project for the U.S. Department of State where I traveled to different embassies,” he says. “In two years, I went to 18 countries. My first round-the-world was China to Paris to Equatorial Guinea to Algeria and back. It was quite an experience.”

    Now working for health care firm DaVita and based in Nashville, he’s hoping for more travel opportunities. “One of the things I like about DaVita is that they’re expanding internationally, so there may be travel opportunities down the road,” he says.

    Narveson’s taste for travel was whetted by a study-abroad experience in Shanghai when he was an undergraduate at Colorado State University. “Studying in China was still kind of new at the time,” he says. “When I was there, no one spoke English. Now I go and everyone speaks English. The city has grown immensely.”

    That rate of change is part of what drives his wanderlust—that, and wanting to get in as many countries as possible before life’s responsibilities slow him down.

    “Originally, my goal was 50 countries by the time I was 30, but I passed that,” he says. (His current tally is 54.) “My life goal is now 100.”

    Narveson’s main recommendation for other travelers is to find the hidden gems off the beaten path.

    “Find those changing parts of the world now,” he says. “Western Europe will always be there, the Eiffel Tower will be there in 70 years, but I was just in Bangladesh, and I’m sure in 70 years, it will be drastically different.”