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But at 21, the student engineer was called off to World War I as a private. At the front, he decorated his dugout with flowered wallpaper, draperies and tufted pillows. He designed himself a new pair of pants because the government-issue pants were badly cut ("I enjoyed going into action well-dressed"). After four years of war−during which he was burned severely by mustard gas−he came out a captain, with a swatch of ribbons on his chest but no money in his pockets. His older brother Georges, a doctor in Manhattan, urged Raymond to join him. At 26, still wearing his captain's uniform (the only clothing he had), Loewy sailed for the U.S. with a total capital of $40. Aboard ship, his sketching so impressed Sir Harry Gloster Armstrong, then British consul general in New York, that he gave him a note of introduction to Publisher Conde Nast.
The publisher, in turn, was also impressed by the Parisian suavity and horizon-blue uniform of the dapper young officer. He put him to work on fashion illustrations for Vogue, and Loewy swiftly demonstrated his unmatched ability to impress all the right people.
Before long, the benefit of his shrewd, appraising eye was being respectfully sought by such merchandising bigwigs as John Wanamaker and Horace Saks.
One day in 1927, at a friend's home, he met Britain's Sigmund Gestetner, maker of a famed old duplicating machine whose design had not been appreciably changed in 30 years. Loewy lugged the duplicator up to his apartment and built a clay model embodying his ideas. Gestetner liked it so well that he paid Loewy $2,000 for it and used the same design for 15 years afterward. (Gestetner paid him a yearly retainer not to design for any competitor.) Overnight, Fashion Artist Loewy decided to become an industrial designer.
75% Transportation. Loewy quickly found out that industrial design was not easy: it was "25% inspiration and 75% transportation." He lugged briefcases of designs from one manufacturer to another around the U.S., barely sold enough to keep body and penthouse together for his first wife, Nebraska-born Jean Thomson. (Divorced in 1945, they parted "the best of friends," and she still has a 4% interest in his company.)
His first big chance came when Sears, Roebuck & Co. hired him in 1934 to dress up its Coldspot refrigerator, an ugly machine with a dust trap under its spindly legs, and corrugated shelves inside. Loewy moved the motor, from top to bottom, chopped off the legs, and installed the first non-rusting aluminum shelves ever to be used in a refrigerator. The Coldspot became a single smooth, gleaming unit of functional simplicity—and with it Sears' sales shot up five-fold by 1936. Loewy had been paid only $2,500 for the job (and had spent nearly three times that in expenses), but Sears was glad to pay him $25,000 for his next job. His reputation was made.