[ad_1]
KOHLER, WISCONSIN – SEPTEMBER 26: Kohler Company executive chairman Herbert Kohler Jr. and his wife Natalie Black look on prior to Sunday Singles Matches of the 43rd Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits on September 26, 2021 in Kohler, Wisconsin. (Photo by Andrew Redington/Getty Images)
Photo:
Andrew Redington/Getty Images
Family businesses that grow into giant firms yet stay family-owned are rarities these days. One of the most enduring and successful is the Kohler Co., the power and plumbing fixtures firm based in its namesake Wisconsin village, thanks to the efforts and vision of former CEO Herbert Kohler Jr., who died Saturday at age 83.
The Kohler company was founded in 1873 by Herb Kohler’s grandfather, Austrian immigrant John Michael Kohler. Herb Kohler took over in 1972 when the company had some $160 million in annual revenue and expanded it into a global business with nearly $6 billion in revenue when he stepped down as CEO in 2015.
Herb Kohler turned the company from its utilitarian roots into one that stressed design as well as functionality in its bathroom and kitchen fixtures. His son David succeeded Herb as CEO. The company’s success is a reminder that old manufacturing businesses can succeed by adapting to new tastes and the demands of the marketplace.
Herb Kohler is less well known as the man who put his corner of Wisconsin—half way between Milwaukee and Green Bay near Sheboygan—on the map as a global golf destination. With the help of designer Pete Dye, Kohler took a stretch of farmland and an abandoned airfield and developed several courses that attract golfers from around the country and world.
Whistling Straits, a Scottish links-style course on the Lake Michigan shore, hosted the Ryder Cup in 2021 and has also hosted three PGA tournaments, one of professional golf’s four major annual men’s championships.
As the Chicago Tribune once put it, “The likelihood of turning this vast rural farmland into a golf mecca is about the same as making a toilet a work of art. Herbert Kohler can now say he has done both.”
Starting a successful business is enormously difficult, but keeping a U.S. manufacturing firm flourishing in the latter half of the 20th and early 21st centuries was arguably even harder. Herb Kohler could say he did that too.
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the September 6, 2022, print edition.
[ad_2]
Source link
(This article is generated through the syndicated feeds, Financetin doesn’t own any part of this article)
