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When Shandy Cossell pops up on video, you can see that he’s framed by a “building inside a building” of sorts, framing for a smaller enclosure inside a much larger one. It turns out that last year’s trade show booth for Innomark was made in the style of an old vinyl record store.
Innomark, a visual marketing company that creates custom retail displays for brands across the globe, tends to go all-out on its trade show booths, and this was no exception. The company launched RWOB, an in-house strategy, design, and execution group that specializes in brand experience, custom fixtures, and retail environments, and technology elements. After the trade show, Cossell, lead prototype engineer, wound up inheriting it as his de facto office. Cossell, just by appearing on screen where he works, already said so much about what he does.
Cossell is in a unique position, and he knows it. He gets renderings from Innomark’s engineering team, and his job is to take those designs and make them a reality. It’s the kind of job you assume has to exist somewhere but never one that’s advertised. That’s because people seem to become these jobs, as opposed to just working at these jobs.
“People talk about retirement and what they’re going to do, and I’m just not wired that way,” Cossell says. “I like what I do, so it’s not really work for me. The people part can be a little challenging at times, but why would I ever want to stop making things?”
The prototyper says he’s not an artist, and because he forwent a full ride to Purdue University to pursue engineering, he doesn’t really consider himself that, either. His dad was a mechanic who was entrenched in the hot rod world, and, along with growing up in a garage, Cossell says he was lucky enough to have a career center at high school and a teacher who encouraged him to pursue a machine shop class that gave way to welding and all manner of working with his hands.
He’d go on to spend twenty-seven years in the world of signage, fabricating custom builds from metal and plastic. His uncle was an Innomark employee and would tell his nephew about the interesting things getting built, and over time, Cossell’s interest was piqued enough to reach out to the company.
“I’m just always interested in how challenging a project can seem,” the builder says. “That’s what I’m interested in. Can I overcome this challenge and do it in time?”
The time part of the equation can be tricky. Cossell remembers a custom display, a massive rock with yellow and gold lighting and sound effects, for a well-known eyewear brand. It was a one-off build that they weren’t sure how it would work up until it was finished. The only problem was that it was finished a day before it was due.
“This isn’t the norm, obviously, but it was one of those wild one-offs that just came down the wire,” Cossell says. “I had to put it in a box truck and drive it from Ohio to Florida myself, with the paint drying on the way. That’s a good memory. And then we immediately got to follow it up with a project for the Olympics.”
Just the night before speaking with American Builders Quarterly, Cossell and his team made the call to abandon an original approach and convert an entire build to metal, swapping materials without sacrificing the integrity of the original idea. That kind of pivot is normal in his world, and it’s the kind of challenge he looks forward to confronting daily.
The x-factor in Cossell’s work is the consideration he places in who is interacting with his builds. He must think like an installer, a sales associate, and a consumer. Not every install team has a construction background, nor the kind of frame, to be handling heavy pieces of a larger whole.
“Once it gets to a store or wherever it’s going, it’s got to be as easy as possible for anyone assembling it,” Cossell says.
The builder is backed by his counterpart, Pete, a longtime acquaintance whose paths crossed with his own over a couple of decades in the fabrication business. The engineering and design group is also growing.
And for those who hope to find a unicorn position like this, Cossell says take the time to learn about tools, to learn about process, and to understand that pay and predictability come a distant second and third to a career spending making things. The creation must be your driver, or it just won’t add up.
“My happiness—there’s no dollar sign on it,” Cossell says. “It seems like so many people are unhappy in their jobs. I can’t imagine what that’s like.”
