Q&A: Dale Coates

Dale Coates is TLMI’s new president and CEO, having taken over from Linnea Keen, who announced her resignation at the TLMI 2025 Annual Meeting.

Coates first joined TLMI in November 2020 as the association’s engagement director. She has since held roles as vice president of member operations and engagement and as COO at TLMI.

She has a PhD in polymer science from the University of Connecticut and a Bachelor of Science in physics/engineering from Washington and Lee University. Prior to her time as a TLMI professional, she worked at Unison Tube and Franklin International and had been involved with TLMI as a supplier member.

L&L: What do you see as the primary purpose of TLMI?

Dale Coates: Our purpose is really to provide connection. We do that through how we bring people together, the knowledge that we share, and solutions that we’re sharing at our meetings.

The TLMI values are community, insight and advocacy, and we try to use those values to drive any of our programming, any of our studies, and any of our in-person events or virtual events. 

“My vision for TLMI is that we continue to be the space where people can come together”

We host several in-person networking events each year. In the spring, we typically do a printer member leadership-style meeting. In the summer, we have Label Leaders of Tomorrow. In the fall is our big Annual Meeting, where everyone comes together to network and share. Our Committee Summit is the last event of the year. That is where our tried-and-true volunteers come together and work all day. We spend the entire day in meetings, planning and anticipating what the membership might need in the coming year.

We also are participating in other events, and Loupe Americas is one of them. We’ll be so excited to be part of Loupe Americas in the fall, and we enjoy bringing our membership together for that.

We’ve really tried to amp up our webinars over the last couple of years. So again, the idea is that we’re trying to connect people through knowledge and solution-sharing. 

When it comes to connection, we really believe in members helping each other because there’s so much expertise across this industry. That’s why we started a program called TLMI Gurus. It’s a way to connect someone who has a question with someone who’s already an expert and willing to share their knowledge.

At the end of the day, connection is a primary focus for us, and we provide it through multiple avenues.

L&L: What is your vision for TLMI?

DC: I recently had a really fun thing happen. We received some history from the son of a former TLMI chair. His father had described TLMI to him as the perfect balance of competition and collaboration.

That’s so true. And my vision for TLMI is that we continue to be the space where people can come together. They not only find support and solutions, but sometimes they find their lifelong friends, and it’s all under this umbrella of advancing the industry.

I hope I can help position TLMI to continue leading in this space, supporting our members and the industry overall.

L&L: What are the most significant initiatives that TLMI 
is currently undertaking, and what are the next steps for 
those initiatives?

DC: I’ve already mentioned some of the things we’re doing with webinars. We have quarterly ones for regulatory affairs issues. We work with a partner, Pace LLP, to keep our members informed about anything that falls under that regulatory umbrella. We also have quarterly workforce updates. Additionally, we’re having technical special topics, and multiple times a year, we bring in some special sustainability speakers as well.

We’re launching some partnerships to bring other association education resources to our members at a discount. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel if there’s great content that already exists out there. 

I already mentioned the TLMI Gurus – members helping members is one of our big initiatives through that program.

The Converter Exchange is a new webinar series we’ve started, and in each session, a supplier member shares information about a product their company produces or a service they provide. It gives them a little bit of a different style of networking when we aren’t in person.

We’re trying to have some more focused networking opportunities at our meetings. Those might be peer-to-peer or seller-to-buyer. We’ve introduced speed networking at both the spring meeting and the fall meeting, and it’s been a lot of fun. We are using AI to do the matching. 

We always value and have an initiative to meet our members where they are, so Labelexpo/Loupe Americas will be that opportunity this year, as well as some other events we participate in.

We have started, in the last couple of years, some exclusive member benefits. These are partnerships that we’ve developed with companies that can offer some kind of savings to our membership if they choose to work with them. That can be anything from credit card processing and purchasing platforms to shipping or supplies for their facilities or even human resources assistance or planning needs. We are promoting those and to make sure that our members are aware of those resources and are taking advantage of them.

L&L: What do you see as some of the biggest challenges facing TLMI?

DC: I think all association people would say this, that it’s getting our share of someone’s time. We are all busier than ever before, and our members and prospective members have so many options for connection and for education.

TLMI strives to provide events and information for our members that are beneficial. We want it to be easy to find. We want to make sure we’re doing things that add value to them, both personally and professionally. 

Our members share with us that, if they allow themselves to take that break and connect with their peers and to learn and have a little fun at some of our events, they always feel like it’s worth the time away from the regular day-to-day. 

We have some members who join just to do our annual management ratio study. They don’t want to step away and be part of a meeting. We want to make sure that they continue to find value. We’re always adapting those reports and looking again at how to make it as easy as possible to participate.

We’re going to continue to offer benefits that meet each member exactly where they are, whether that’s in person or with just a study or anything in between.

L&L: What are you most excited about in the label industry right now?

DC: AI and automation are the most exciting things. We talk about the workforce being such a problem, and we know the population is declining; we’re not backfilling as we used to. The pool of people that we can attract to the industry, even if we are hugely successful in our efforts, will not alleviate the workforce issue that we see today. It’s still going to be a problem, so the companies that are in a position to be more efficient and embrace new technologies where possible will find solutions and succeed. AI and automation will help with that.

I’m also excited about our young leaders. I was at a meeting and interacted with some of our TLMI members who are considerably younger than I am, and they’re fantastic people, and already in companies where they’re being leaned on heavily, using their strengths to lead their companies for growth. I’m just really excited about the future of the industry in the hands of those individuals.

L&L: What do you think are the biggest issues facing the labeling industry?

DC: Everybody talks about the workforce. It’s going to continue to be a challenge. Regulatory compliance is challenging now. There are a lot of things coming at companies: restrictions, different state and federal regulations. Sustainability is a tricky one. A lot of brands are driving initiatives that are quite positive, but in a lot of places we don’t have the infrastructure in the country yet to support seeing those things through.

Global supply chain volatility is still an issue, and some of that might be due to product availability, but certainly, there’s been a lot this past year just in uncertainty around things like tariffs and how that’s going to impact our industry.

“The pool of people that we can attract to the industry, even if we are hugely successful in our efforts, will not alleviate the workforce issue that we see today”

I sometimes think the biggest issue is a general lack of awareness of the label and packaging industry’s importance to everything else. Labels touch everything. You can’t order things into your house without a label. You can’t have medication without a label. They’re everywhere – in the grocery store, on your favorite bottle of wine, on your car engine, and on anything that needs a safety warning. I’m really excited to see that there’s a greater effort for TLMI going to [Washington], DC, and trying to make people more aware of the importance of the industry.

Our annual board meeting was in Washington, DC in 2025. As part of that meeting, our board members reached out to their legislative representatives and invited them to join us.

Mark Glendenning, Linnea [Keen] and Patrick Potter, representing TLMI, were able to meet with some representatives that couldn’t make our evening event but were willing to sit down and hear a little bit more about our industry and how significant it is. We put together a one-pager that they were able to take that just talked about the breadth of the industry and showed some of the locations of our biggest members, both converter and suppliers, across the country.  

I think you’ll see more of that where we’re trying to just get the word out. A lot of our members are speaking locally with their legislators when they’re back in their home states as well. 

L&L: How does your background shape your perspective of TLMI?

DC: I like details. I was trained as an engineer and a polymer scientist. I love data. I love problem-solving. I really like a good experiment, whether it’s on myself personally or something that we’re doing at TLMI. I like to try new things, evaluate them, adjust to create something better than what we originally hoped for, and then try it all again.

I’d say look for that. Look for us to test some new things. TLMI is a member-driven association, and I’m going to continue to look to our fantastic membership for direction and ideas as we experiment with anything new that we do.

We have a wonderful team right now, energetic, driven colleagues that work with me that bring their best with them every day to help TLMI and to help continue to drive value and help our membership see that value, so I’m excited.