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"Dressed for a Party." Back in Flint, Curtice weeded out the deadwood, kept the good. Under his predecessor, every section of the Buick operation went its own way, with production problems being blamed on engineering, engineering problems blamed on styling, and so on down the line. Curtice called in the heads of all departments on major decisions so that each might know the others' problems and help in their solution. He also had the ads changed to plug the theme that Buick was an auto for the young, with such headlines as DRESSED FOR A PARTY—POWERED FOR A THRILL!
The Curtice medicine soon took effect. In a year Buick's sales rose 44% to 63,067, in two years more to 160,687. In the black days of 1938, while the rest of the industry slumped 47%, Buick's sales slipped but 19%, and Buick went from sixth to fourth in the business. By 1941 it had sales of 308,616, or 8.4% of the auto market.
Under Curtice in World War II, Buick turned out 75,000 Pratt & Whitney engines, 2,507 M18 tank destroyers and an arsenal of artillery shells. By the time Charlie Wilson picked him as his right-hand man in 1948, Curtice's interests ranged over all of G.M. But in his new job as executive vice president, Curtice could apply one of his greatest talents as overall styling boss of the corporation.
Doodlers & Dreamers. Designing a new car involves an arm-long set of finely balanced equations, and enough unknowns to baffle even the most imaginative fortune teller. In its styling section, adjacent to the head office in Detroit, G.M. has a staff of 675 trying to find the answers. Some of them work in the "future" studio, a place where stylists can doodle their fondest dreams on paper, even though there is no chance of their coming true. With the practical dreamers, engineers work side by side to make sure their ideas can be translated into production. To spot any engineering problems, the quarter-size clay models are fitted with movable plastic engines, gearboxes, seats, etc.
To find out what the public wants, G.M.'s customer research department questions 2,000,000 people a year by mail on their likes and dislikes. G.M.'s traveling Motorama provides another fine source of information, with interviewers stationed by every experimental car. The results are all carefully tabulated, passed along to styling and engineering and to President Curtice, who studies them carefully. The surveys are important, e.g., pushbutton doors were made standard equipment when the research department found that 70% of the people interviewed preferred them to handle doors. But surveys would be worthless without a sure styling instinct. Last year Harlow Curtice looked over the roomful of experimental cars, picked the experimental Pontiac and Chewy station wagon as the cars the public would like best. His stylists disagreed, but Curtice's judgment was borne out by the research department poll.