How It Is @ Whirlpool

If you think about a manufacturer of home appliances, things like washers and dryers, refrigerators and ranges, chances are you might not think of pushing the proverbial envelope. Yet at Whirlpool (whirlpool.com), the bounds of the envelope have been breached in a big way, and you can find statements like this on the company’s home page, a place where companies tend not to say much in the way of a defining ethos:

Innovation
Whirlpool Corporation firmly believes innovative thinking comes from everyone, everywhere. Nearly 10 years ago, we launched a worldwide effort to instill innovation as a core competency throughout the entire organization. Since then, Whirlpool employees worldwide have participated in and contributed to innovation-related activities resulting in new ideas, products and services; thus delivering real value to consumers in ways never before seen in either the company or the home appliance industry.

Focused on embedding innovation as a core competency, Whirlpool Corporation has made a long-standing investment to build this competency. This investment includes redesigning business processes, training thousands of employees, building an innovation management system and changing the culture of the company.

Innovation attracts consumers to our wide portfolio of brands; however it also offers a sustainable competitive advantage. In 2007, Whirlpool Corporation generated more than $2.5 billion of worldwide revenue from product innovations—well exceeding projected targets for the year—and the robust pipeline of $4.5 billion will allow for continued growth over time.

Clearly, they understand the driver for success is innovation, and a fundamental of creating innovative products is design. Which brings us to a man named Patrick Schiavone.

The last time we saw Schiavone, he was design director at Ford Motor Company (ford.com). In fact, the last several times we saw Schiavone he was with Ford, associated with work on some of the most iconic products in all of automotive history, like the 1994 Mustang and the past three generations of the Ford F-150 pickup truck, the biggest-selling vehicle in America for literally decades. Schiavone, a 1988 graduate of the College for Creative Studies (collegeforcreativestudies.edu) in Detroit with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, had spent 21 years with Ford. The Akron, OH, native once admitted, “I started drawing cars when I was about 3 years old,” but had prefaced that remark by saying, “Drawing and designing represent the passion in my life.”

So what’s all this about Ford in an article that has a headline about Whirlpool? Well, we just caught up with Schiavone, and he’s shifted from the east side of Michigan to the west, from Ford in Dearborn to Whirlpool Corp. in Benton Harbor.

In January 2010, Schiavone became vice president-Design at Whirlpool.

It is interesting to note that there are parallels between the two companies that certainly represent exemplary consumer product development and production. The roots of Whirlpool go back to 1908, when Lou Upton began to produce household equipment. Although that didn’t work out, in 1911 he established the Upton Machine Company in St. Joseph, MI, which is adjacent to and just south of Benton Harbor. In 1908, the Ford Model T was introduced. And while the Ford Motor Company was established in 1903, the venture that preceded that, the Henry Ford Company, which was established in 1901, saw Ford leave it in 1902 (it, interestingly, was to become Cadillac).

During World War II, the Nineteen Hundred Corp. (which was to be renamed “Whirlpool”
in 1949) stopped making washers and started manufacturing components for the P-40 Warhawk plane. Ford stopped making cars and started building the Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber.

In 1960, Whirlpool received a contract to build America’s first experimental space kitchen and in subsequent years worked with NASA to develop equipment for the Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab missions. In 1963 Ford received the contract to develop the Mission Control Center for NASA.

Whirlpool is undertaking an environmental sustainability initiative; Ford is, as well.

And on it goes.

All of which is to say that Schiavone is in a place that is different from where he had been, but curiously similar. And he admits, “It is very similar to the auto industry—there are a lot of the same kind of issues and challenges and successes. Market research has evolved as a discipline here as it has in the auto industry.
And . . .”

And then he recalls something. When John Lasseter and his colleagues at Pixar Studios (pixar.com) were developing the movie that was to become Cars (2006), they spent time with Ford designers, including Schiavone. Schiavone says he gained the realization that there was a great deal of similarity—everything from the same computer hardware and software to the “creative recipes”—between making a movie or making a car. And it is similar to how appliances are designed.

Schiavone points out that since the advent of the Duet washer and dryer in 2001, the days of “the white box era are over.”

He insists, “The appliance industry has become a full-on consumer goods industry. It is more like the electronics industry than the white goods industry.” More like it in terms of the product cadence. More like it in terms of the technology. More like it in terms of the attention to form language.

And interestingly enough, in 2001, Popular Mechanics gave its Design & Engineering Award, among other products, to the Duet HT as well as the Microsoft Xbox . . . and the 2002 Ford Thunderbird.

Schiavone says that he’s looking for the ways and means to “surprise and delight the customer” in a variety of ways as he and his team—“I am impressed with the sensational talent pool here, and I hope to unleash that talent”—create new products for not only the laundry room, but the kitchen and other parts of the house, as well.

He says that they are looking at how advances in both technology and manufacturing techniques will permit them to design products that have high styling cues that will be products that consumers want to have, not simply need. That is, while someone might get a new car every two or three years or a new iPod every time a new generation appears, chances are appliances are something that stay in place until there is a failure or a remodeling job, neither of which necessarily happen all that frequently. But Schiavone thinks that if they are able to create products that have tremendous appeal, “customers will trade in their current products because they want the new one.”

He’s looking at everything from electronics interfaces to the size of the glass on oven doors to “the quality of the way doors close or the feel of knobs.”

“We want to put some visual language to some of the new technologies and manufacturing processes that are out there,” he says. And he cites what has become a touchstone for designers of all types: Apple.

“The beauty of an Apple product is the simplicity of it, the attention to detail, and the showing off of the technology that it came from. And those are the things that I am absolutely trying to do here.”