Executive Q&A with Jennifer Miller, Sappi's EVP of Strategic Marketing and Chief Sustainability Officer

Q: Tell us about Sappi Fine Paper, the segment of the market it serves, and who you consider to be your core users.

A: Sappi Fine Paper North America is a preeminent producer of coated fine paper used in premium magazines, catalogs, books, and high-end print advertising, where the print fidelity is critical to the printed communications material. Our customers are merchants, graphic designers, printers, and corporate end users that handle advertising.

Sappi is known for innovation and quality. Our brand names, including McCoy, Opus, Somerset, and Flo, are some of the industry’s most widely recognized and specified. Our mills in North America are triple chain of custody certified to the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), and Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC). Sappi Fine Paper North America also has the lowest carbon footprint of any major North American coated paper supplier, as 85 percent of the energy used by our North American mills comes from renewable resources.

Sappi Fine Paper North America is a division of Sappi Limited (NYSE and JSE), a global company headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa, with manufacturing operations on four continents in nine countries, sales offices in over 26 countries, and customers in over 100 countries around the world.

Q: What is your background and how did you get involved with your company?

A: It is probably not what you expect! I am a lawyer by training and joined Sappi as general counsel back in 1996, just after Sappi’s acquisition of S.D. Warren. Before that I was general counsel of New England’s largest gas distribution utility—during a decade of extreme focus on deregulation of rates and business practices but stricter regulation of environmental issues. My legal experiences have prepared me well for the issues facing the paper industry now: a cataclysmic change in the business environment we now face as well as the need to adopt a proactive and transparent approach to environment issues, from renewable feedstocks to low carbon impacts.

Q: What do you consider to be your greatest achievement in this market?

A: Helping transform Sappi Fine Paper North America from a strict manufacturing focus to one that starts with understanding all of our customers’ needs and then delivering against those needs—which, of course, includes operational excellence. Our ability to stay focused on our customers’ changing needs and understanding better what they require from us to succeed in their own business has led to our own financial success, despite challenging industry conditions. But we are not complacent and know that we must continually refresh and renew our approaches to the market every year, really every month, in order to continue to succeed.

This, by the way, includes our commitment to sustainability. We know that our customers have a legitimate and real need to fully understand the impact of our operations on the environment and what steps we have taken and plan to take to minimize that impact. We understand that our commitment to the sustainable practices is integral to our financial success and in fact go hand in hand. Our reduction in the use of fossil fuels, our lower rates of organic landfill, and overall reduction of waste in our operations both benefits our environment and the bottom line.

Q. If you could change anything, either about your career, your company, or the market as a whole, what would it be and why?

A: Let me answer that question this way: I think all of us in our industry need to re-examine our passion and commitment for our product—high end printed communication and advertising materials. We need to remind ourselves that we have a relevant, vibrant, exciting product that enriches the experience of all sorts of people in all sorts of ways—different from any other media. And then we need to go out and teach, and demonstrate, and advocate the best use of our product to the world.