Celeste Mastin and the business of holding things together

The chief executive of an adhesives company went to the New York Stock Exchange and broke the gavel. There are occasions when a business appears to commission its own joke. For Celeste Mastin, this was one of them. After the October 2025 closing bell ceremony, she thanked the exchange team, apologized for the damage, and suggested that the mishap demonstrated the consequences of failing to use H.B. Fuller adhesives. A ceremonial appearance had supplied a rather practical product pitch.

It was a pleasing interruption to the usual choreography of public company leadership. The podium, the applause, the investor calendar: all familiar. The broken implement, less so. Mastin made herself part of the joke. For someone whose working life has involved explaining why things stay together, the incident was almost excessively cooperative.

There is a longer story behind that podium. It begins on a ranch in Washington state, travels through chemical engineering and industrial sales, includes a Japanese joint venture and several chief executive jobs, and arrives in Minnesota. Along the way, Mastin accumulated experience on both sides of an industrial transaction: making a product and getting it to the customer who needs it.

A ranch, a degree, and a sales territory

Mastin grew up on a Washington ranch. She earned a chemical engineering degree at Washington State University, with a mathematics minor, graduating in 1990. Her first job was in sales at Shell Chemical. The distinction matters. Engineering gave her a way to understand a material; sales required her to understand why another person might want to buy it.

She spent five years at Shell before moving to Bostik. There, her responsibilities expanded from European sales management to global sales management. She became general manager of Nitta Findley, the Bostik and Nitta Gelatin joint venture in Osaka, and eventually ran Bostik's global nonwovens adhesives business. She also earned an MBA from the University of Houston.

Those assignments put technical knowledge beside commercial responsibility. A formulation has properties. A customer has requirements. Between them sits the work of making the two agree, at a price and on a schedule that both organizations can live with. Mastin's early career placed her repeatedly at that meeting point.

The education that came after engineering

Her next moves widened the syllabus. At Ferro, she held executive roles in growth and development and in color and glass performance materials. Then came MMI Products, where she served as CEO from 2007 to 2011. The building materials business had 79 locations, including 18 manufacturing sites, and about 2,500 employees. The assignment involved a turnaround.

Consider how different that responsibility is from managing an adhesive formulation. Sites have managers, equipment, transport needs, inventories and customers. Multiplying locations multiplies the number of places where a reasonable plan can meet an unreasonable Tuesday. Technical fluency remains useful. It acquires company.

At Distribution International, which she led from 2013 to 2017, Mastin doubled the business through 13 acquisitions. Its network extended across the United States and Canada. PetroChoice followed in 2018, adding another chapter in distribution before she joined H.B. Fuller in 2022. Her route to the CEO's office had passed through insulation, building materials and lubricants as well as adhesives.

The common subject was industrial complexity. Each business required decisions about products, customers, people and the geography between them. By the time Fuller hired her, she had spent decades encountering those decisions in different combinations. Returning to adhesives meant bringing the rest of that education along.

Nine months to the top job

Mastin joined Fuller as chief operating officer on March 7, 2022. In September, the company announced that she would succeed Jim Owens as president and CEO on December 4. The interval looked quick from outside. The board described the appointment as the conclusion of a succession process that had taken several years.

Owens had led the company for 12 years. Mastin inherited an established direction: more technically demanding products and a portfolio moving toward markets with stronger growth and margins. Her appointment statement emphasized continuing that strategy, accelerating organic growth and improving profitability. This was a handover with a stated destination.

That makes the job more interesting than the familiar arrival story in which a new boss declares everything ready for reinvention. Continuity creates its own test. The next leader must demonstrate where an inherited strategy can go, make choices about the pace, and accept responsibility for the results. The signature changes before the consequences do.

Getting people in the same room

Mastin's public updates often return to employees. In 2024, she described a gathering of more than 130 global leaders, emphasizing the conversations alongside the business updates. The following year she thanked more than 40 participants in Fuller's business and manufacturing leadership academies after their meeting in Amsterdam. These were multi-year programs designed around specific capabilities needed across the company.

That attention reaches people at the beginning of their careers, too. After a question-and-answer session with summer interns at the St. Paul headquarters, she thanked them for bringing fresh perspectives and challenging how the business thinks. The exchange places a CEO with a chemical engineering degree in conversation with students preparing for engineering and supply chain careers. The distance between the two ends of the table is professional experience.

Her view of leadership has also left an impression on people who worked for her earlier. David Dzina, whose insulation business was acquired by Distribution International, later described lessons from working for Mastin: giving people responsibility, leading with humility and paying attention to culture. It is a former colleague's account, grounded in the experience of joining a larger business after a sale.

Acquisitions make that experience consequential. The announcement names a buyer and a price. The following morning introduces colleagues, expectations and unfamiliar systems. Someone still needs to answer the customer. A leader who has worked in distribution has had plenty of opportunities to appreciate the importance of that last sentence.

An old company with a speed problem to solve

In a 2024 conversation with Knowde's Ali Amin-Javaheri, Mastin described the difficulty of managing a highly varied adhesives business. Fuller was buying more than 30,000 distinct raw materials. A typical formulation involved about ten ingredients. Digital tools and artificial intelligence interested her as ways to handle that complexity and respond to customers faster.

“In our industry, speed wins.”

Celeste Mastin, 2024 executive interview

That is an unusually concrete way to frame a technology agenda. The useful question becomes how quickly a customer can get a suitable answer. A searchable body of technical knowledge has commercial value if it helps the person trying to solve a bonding problem. The customer is unlikely to applaud the database architecture. A working product has a better chance.

Her argument gives the digital project a recognizable industrial purpose. Different materials, applications and acquired technologies create a great deal to know. Making that knowledge accessible helps a larger organization behave with some of the responsiveness customers expect from a smaller supplier. Scale has to earn its keep at the point of contact.

The numbers have to hold, too

At the end of fiscal 2025, Fuller reported an adjusted EBITDA margin of 17.9%. Mastin's shareholder letter described that as an improvement of 3.7 percentage points since the beginning of her CEO tenure in fiscal 2023. The company also introduced Project Quantum Leap, a multi-year effort to modernize its supply chain and reshape its manufacturing footprint.

The program targeted $75 million in annual savings by 2030. That was a target, with work still to do. The language of manufacturing optimization can sound tidy on an investor slide; its substance involves where products are made, how capacity is used and how reliably orders move through the network.

By the third quarter of fiscal 2026, adjusted EBITDA margin reached 19.9%, up 0.8 percentage points from the corresponding quarter a year earlier. Adjusted EBITDA was $187 million, up 9%. The company credited pricing and restructuring savings. These are company results delivered by a large organization, and they provide a more useful test of a CEO's strategy than the elegance of its presentation.

The customer gets the last word

In October 2026, two customer projects illustrated the kinds of problems Fuller's teams were helping solve. Bin Dasmal Group worked with the company on prefabricated protection for HVAC insulation. Integrating the protective material before delivery reduced the amount of assembly needed at the jobsite. In some applications, installation time fell by more than half.

Huhtamaki approached a different problem: reducing plastic in paper-based dairy packaging while preserving the barrier performance the package needed. Its collaboration with Fuller used a varnish to remove an external polyethylene layer. The customer still required a cup capable of doing its job. Sustainability had to survive contact with the contents.

For Mastin, these projects bring the career back to its starting point. Technical understanding matters because somebody has a practical requirement. Selling matters because the solution has to make sense to that person. Leading matters because many other people must contribute before the answer can leave the plant.

Her ongoing connection to Washington State includes service on the Voiland School's advisory board. The engineering graduate has become one of the people helping the school consider what comes next. The route from ranch to sales territory to Osaka to Minnesota is now experience she can bring back to students and faculty.

The broken gavel remains the more entertaining illustration of her trade. A material fails, everyone notices, and an adhesives executive finds herself with an opening. Most of Mastin's work is less conveniently theatrical. It happens in decisions about customers, factories and colleagues, with the expectation that the finished result will hold together long after the applause stops.