Throwback Thursday: Mold Maker and Mold Designer of the Year Award Winners

Serving as the Society of Plastics Engineers MTD Division Secretary, I am putting a call out for candidates to be considered for the next SPE MTD Mold Maker and Mold Designer of the Year Award. These awards give recognition to individuals who not only are regarded as technical leaders, but also work to 'give back' to our industry. After reviewing submissions, we will be presenting the awards at the Amerimold on June 13 in Novi, Michigan.  

To submit a candidate for consideration, please fill out your contact information, along with the contact information for the award candidate. Please identify the award that you are submitting the candidate for either the Mold Maker of the Year or the Mold Designer of the Year.

Also, please include information on the candidate (bio, description of accomplishments, etc.) to explain why you believe that your candidate should receive the respective award.

Click here to nominate.

A few recent past winners include:

Wayne Hertlein—then senior tooling engineer for Troy, MI-based Collins & Aikman Global Tooling Company was recipient of the Mold Designer of the Year 2004 Award. 

Arthur Stoll of Armin Tool & Manufacturing Co. was named Mold Designer of the Year 2010 He founded Armin in 1952, helped to set the industry’s bar for quality mold making, bringing his flair for ingenuity and problem-solving into every project, and nurturing the talents of those who worked at Armin through the years.

Barbara Arnold-Feret from Fort Worth, Texas was the 2012 Mold Designer of the Year. She then was a consultant with PARTS, Ltd. in the Fort Worth/Dallas area and started her career in the plastics industry as a teenager while working at her father’s company where she began honing her mold making skills. 

Robert Novak of Waukesha, Wisconsin was the recipient of the 2012 Moldmaker of the Year Award.  Robert is an Instructor at Waukesha County Technical College (WCTC) in Waukesha, Wisconsin in the mold making area and is a distinguished member of the Milwaukee Section of the Society of Plastics Engineers and the Mold Making and Mold Design Division.  

2013 Mold Maker of the Year was Roger Klouda of MSI Mold Builders, Cedar Rapids IA, and Mold Designer of the Year was Tim Peterson of Industrial Molds Group, Rockford, IL. Both were present for the award presentation.A $500.00 honorarium will be awarded in both recipients names to the training school or university of his choice.

For his dedication to the moldmaking industry and for being a great leader and role model, Steve Johnson of MoldTrax, a provider of maintenance training products and services, was selected and recognized as the 2014 Mold Designer of the Year.

Renee Nehls was named SPE’s Mold Designer of the Year in 2017. She is a tooling engineer at SussexIM in Sussex, Wisconsin, and has worked as a mold designer for more than 20 of her 30 years in the plastics industry. 

Andrew Baker is was 2017 Moldmaker of the Year. He is the strategic account manager at Byrne Tool and Design in Rockford, Michigan. He began his career as a moldmaker in the mid 1990s, working at Legacy Precision Molds. He joined the team at Byrne Tool in 2000 and never looked back, moving from project management to operations manager and eventually strategic account manager at Byrne Tool, a division of Byrne electric.