MARCH 2015 RETAILOBSERVER.COM
9
A
s a young man with an idea for a new kind
of business, you could do a lot worse than
having Frank Lloyd Wright give you your
first big break.
That's what happened to Westye Bakke in the
1930s. Wright, a fellow Wisconsin native, had heard
of Westye's aptitude for designing refrigeration
systems. He hired the young man as a consultant to
help create uniquely sized refrigerators for the
architect's residential projects.
By 1943, despite the materials shortages brought
on by World War II, in classic entrepreneurial style,
Westye had turned the basement of his Madison
home into a product development lab and was
planning to launch a new company. Working alone,
he used scrap metal and other salvaged materials
to fashion the prototype for a new kind of freezer,
more reliable than any that had come before and
able to store its contents at stable, exceptionally low
temperatures – literally sub-zero.
If Frank Lloyd Wright provided the early aesthetic
inspiration for Westye, more personal motivations
spurred him to push through the technical
limitations and supply shortages of the day to
pioneer high-performance refrigeration for the
home: His young son, Bud, had juvenile diabetes.
The lack of reliable home refrigeration meant
frequent trips to the drugstore for insulin. Under
those circumstances, getting snowed in by a
Wisconsin blizzard could be more than just
inconvenient. In his basement lab, Westye worked
with urgency.
SUB-ZERO AT
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A Company that Preserves
Its Knack for Innovation
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