Tilisco, a technical business consultancy from Wildeshausen in Lower Saxony, Germany, specialises in comprehensive packaging management and sustainability. Since 2018, industrial engineer Sonja Bähr has been supporting the team headed by company founder Till Isensee. Formerly the managing director of the DVI and BDVI, she was initially not sure if consulting was the right career choice. Nowadays, she is immersed in the subject and swears by her network, which she has built up over more than 30 years in the packaging industry.
My career path never was straightforward. Originally, I wanted to enrol in a course of study as a brewer and maltster at TU Berlin (the Technical University of Berlin), but instead I started studying food technology at the university of applied sciences Berliner Hochschule für Technik (BHT). Packaging technology was located in the same faculty, and I found the subject so fascinating that I switched to it. Subsequently, the Berlin native studied business administration and engineering and completed her studies with a diploma thesis on the topic of packaging. Her first job after receiving her degree was at Berolina Kunststoffe, a manufacturer of storage and transport containers, more precisely at the Dutch company Wavin Trepak, which Berolina Kunststoffe had taken over after the latter’s insolvency.
It was a school of hard knocks, but even back then, we participated in the interpack trade fair. I met my former professor Dieter Berndt there, and he convinced me to apply for the post of managing director at the German Packaging Institute (DVI) and the Association of German Packaging Engineers (BDVI). At the time, the DVI shared an office with the BDVI. “I liked the idea that I could bring together the sector’s synergistic effects in one place with this post.” When she took a year of maternity leave in 2004, Winfried Batzke was her successor. “After my second maternity leave, the joint office of the associations was split up and I took over management at the BDVI. This post ended after eleven years, which was a tremendous opportunity for me to start something completely new. When my former fellow student Till Isensee from Tilisco offered me a job at his company in 2018, I pounced on it and carved out a niche for myself in my areas of expertise communication, labelling and legal framework.”