2007 Minnesota Business Hall of Fame

Though it’s Minnesota’s 38th-largest private firm, with 5,500 employees and estimated 2006 revenues of $600 million, Marvin Windows and Doors remains headquartered in its home-town of Warroad, a city of 1,700 just a few miles from the Canadian border on Lake of the Woods. At the end of each fiscal year, Marvin dispenses its well-publicized profit-sharing bonuses. (In 2006, an average employee received around $4,500—and that was considered modest.) To Bill Marvin, who has driven the firm’s growth for more than half a century, its success far from major cities or thoroughfares is no accident. The people of Warroad gave rise to that success, and they deserve his loyalty.

Marvin was born five years after his father, George, founded the Marvin Lumber & Cedar Company in Warroad in 1912, an outgrowth of an earlier business he’d owned. Bill Marvin was 22 when he joined Marvin Lumber full time in 1939 as its eighth employee (and secretary-treasurer). That was the same year the lumberyard manager, Harry York, suggested building customized window and door frames to tide the company over during the slow winter season. After World War II, Bill pushed the company to expand into making complete windows and doors, as demand for new housing exploded.

A 1961 fire destroyed the Marvin factory. As Bill Marvin recalls, only 57 percent of the business was insured. “We could have easily gone to another location in the U.S. or Canada,” he says. “As a matter of fact, we were offered a fully operational window plant in Denver. It would have been easy to go. But we were committed to Warroad and to Minnesota. The company’s purpose from the beginning was to provide jobs to a community that otherwise wouldn’t have them. The commitment to Warroad was too great.” So the plant was rebuilt, bigger than before. The current Warroad facility comprises 2 million square feet.

George Marvin stayed involved in the company he founded almost to the day he died, at age 94 in 1976. By then, it had changed its name, and the next generation, led by Bill, had begun to take a leadership role. Bill Marvin served as CEO from 1986 to 2000, and held the titles of chairman and president from 1960 to 2001.

Under his guidance, the company continued to focus on the capability that set it apart in the market—product customization. “The philosophy of making a window once it is ordered rather than maintaining an inventory was unheard of at the time,” he says, and allowed Marvin “to meet each customer’s unique design and performance specifications in a way that was not widely available for years to come. While made-to-order is common across all industries today, from windows to home computers, Marvin set the standard decades ago.”

Marvin Windows also successfully jumped on what might be called the This Old House bandwagon, as owners of older homes looked for ways to update their houses while staying true to the original architecture. Many of these traditional-house touches have found their way into new construction as well. At Marvin Windows, this expressed itself in the reintroduction of the round-top window in 1979, a style the company became known for.

“While round tops were of vital importance to owners of historical homes and buildings, since they could now replace their old, less efficient windows with historically accurate round tops,” Marvin says, “they were also vitally important to architecture in new construction, giving architects and homeowners new possibilities in residential design. The custom work Marvin does—both in round tops and other windows—that other window companies wouldn’t do was what made the company successful.”

His sense of innovation has been a key driver of the company’s growth. “He has an incredible talent and enthusiasm for recognizing ideas that will work,” says Linda Hall Whitman, a vice president of business development for Minnetonka-based UnitedHealth Group. Whitman collaborated with Marvin on a home-automation project she undertook while at Honeywell 16 years ago. In 2002, when she became CEO of Minneapolis-based Minute Clinic, Marvin was one of the company’s investors. Besides his openness to new ideas, Whitman touts his sense of corporate responsibility. At Marvin, “he’s had a single-minded devotion to the company and the people who work there,” she says.

Another admirer of Bill Marvin is Roger O’Shaughnessy, president and CEO of Eden Prairie–based Cardinal Glass Industries, a Marvin supplier, who praises Marvin’s hard work and plain dealing. “It was his vision and passion to take a start-up window business to the point where it is number two or three in the country behind brands which are at least 50 years older,” O’Shaughnessy observes.