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His methods often mystify clients. When Chicago's Armour & Co. hired Loewy to redesign and repackage its 700-800 different products, he disappeared for about six months. Said Vice President Walter S. Shafer: "We didn't know what he was doing." Actually, Loewymen were out talking to hundreds of housewives who bought the products. When Loewy came back he told Armour to abolish all the multicolor labels that it had been using, and substitute a simple two-color pattern throughout. Armour saved enough money on color-printing alone to pay for the designer's services. As Lever Bros.' Charles Luckman, another client, put it: "Raymond keeps one eye on imagination and one eye on the cash register."
Flash of a Knife. In 1943 when he began designing the first postwar Studebaker, Loewy decided that current cars were too bulky, too laden with chromium "spinach and schmalz," and had too many blind spots for the driver. What he wanted was slimness, grace and better visibility. To his staff he mapped the grand strategy: "Weight is the enemy . . . Whatever saves weight saves cost. The car must look fast, whether in motion or stationary. I want it to look as if it were leaping forward; I want 'built-in' motion ... If it looks 'stopped' it is a dead pigeon ... I want one that looks alive as a leaping greyhound."
He augmented his permanent staff in the Studebaker plant from 28 to 39, talked each design over with engineers to see if it was feasible. From hundreds of tentative designs Loewy pulled a curve here, a hood there, a fender sweep yonder, then "mocked up" about a dozen experimental models in clay, one-quarter size, and worked on them. Says Studebaker's President Harold S. Vance: "I have seen Loewy shake his head in disapproval, then take out a knife and with one sweep correct the clay model to perfection."
When the final model was chosen and mocked up full-size, Loewy called in Studebaker officials and dramatically whisked the coverings off the model. Loewy feels that "it is the first impression that counts; either it clicks or it doesn't."
It clicked so well that in the last three years Studebaker has broken all its peacetime records for sales and profits. Not all Studebaker dealers liked the 1950 models which came out last August. Some did not like the rocketlike hood and nose air intake that resembles the 1949 Ford. But Loewy's answer is in the sales. While most other independent car-makers were having rough going, Stukebaker sold more cars in September than any month in its history. From receivership less than 15 years ago, Studebaker has climbed back, is now the biggest independent—a smaller fourth to the Big Three.
The Locomotive God. Loewy first dreamed of building cars and locomotives in Paris, where he was born and spent the first 26 years of his life. His father, Maximilian, was a Viennese journalist; his mother, Marie Labalme, a sturdy Frenchwoman who prodded her children by continually telling them: "Better to be envied than pitied." Young Raymond, the third of three sons, filled his school notebooks with so many sketches of locomotives, automobiles and airplanes that his parents sent him to engineering school.