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Eggs & Needles. Loewy's business has grown so large that he now has three working partners: A. Baker Barnhart, who has charge of all packaging, product and transportation design; William Snaith, who manages all department-store work; Business Manager John Breen. There are branch offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, South Bend, Ind. and London. All of his designers think so much like him that, says an admiring rival, "If you meet any one of them you meet Loewy."
Says the boss, who takes on jobs for as little as $500 or as much as $200,000: "If you want me to do a big thing like a tractor—there are so many obvious things you could do to make it better-looking that I would take it for very little. But if you want me to redesign a sewing needle, I'd charge $100,000. After all, how can you improve a needle? It's like the perfect functional shape of an egg."
As the "great packager" who tricks up boxes and labels, Designer Loewy lures U.S. consumers into buying more soap, lard, perfume and hair oils. If he did nothing more than such trivial things, consumers might well wonder what benefit, if any, they get from his work. But he also works just as hard making all manner of things better and more usable. His new vacuum cleaner (Singer) is the first which is designed to be hung up flat against a closet wall. Foley Bros, department store, in Houston, was the first department store designed so that a shopper could walk through the store making purchases, and have them all waiting for her when she returned to her car in the store garage. Though Loewy's work does not have the imaginative sweep of Designer Bel Geddes' visions of triple-decked planes, rotary airports and submarinelike ocean liners, he has a greater influence on current design and modern living than any other designer simply because his pen is in so many different inkpots.
Chain Reaction. A small problem often leads to much bigger ones. For example, the job of streamlining International Harvester's tractors led to designing a distinctive new building (1,125 have been built) in which to sell them (see cut).
Loewy's first job for the Pennsylvania Railroad was designing a trash can. That was successful, so he went to work blueprinting a new locomotive. To find out what was wrong with old engines, Loewy rode them for thousands of miles, noting such things as the absence of a toilet for the crew (he installed one), and the fact that smoke sometimes obscured, the engineer's vision (he devised a vane to deflect it). He wound up designing not only new locomotives but whole new trains for Pennsylvania (Broadway Limited, "Spirit of St. Louis," The General, Liberty Limited, etc.), and modern new stations as well. Now he is pondering the biggest problem of all: finding a better and more profitable way to handle all the road's freight.