For more than 110 years, Whirlpool Corporation has been creating innovative solutions to improve life at home. Two longtime Whirlpool Corp. employees, Roy E. Masters and Darryl Bodine have proven their dedication to this vision as they’ve dedicated their careers to inventing and innovating features and functionality for the appliances that consumers use every day to help make life easier.
The culture of innovation at Whirlpool Corp. allows us to think creatively about solutions from the perspective of the consumer to make an impact.”
Masters is one of Whirlpool Corp.’s engineers supporting the laundry category in Advanced Development and Innovation (ADI). He is based in Benton Harbor, Michigan and has been with the company for more than 17 years. During his career journey at Whirlpool Corp., he has submitted more than 60 invention submission disclosures, which led to 69 patent applications in different regions. Eighteen of these filings are already granted.
“Of the many past opportunities that I’ve had in my 17 years at Whirlpool, I am most grateful for the opportunity to develop new products in ADI because of how the team collaborates in order to innovate. The culture of innovation at Whirlpool Corp. allows us to think creatively about solutions from the perspective of the consumer to make an impact,” says Masters.
Two of his latest granted patents relate to lint particle removal and methods to self-clean lint filters.
Darryl Bodine is a global sr. manager in Global Consumer Design (CGD). He is based in Benton Harbor, Michigan and has been with Whirlpool Corp. for more than 22 years. Bodine is listed as a co-inventor on 56 Whirlpool Corp. global patents—including utility and design patents, with 18 of them still pending. One of his latest patent filings covers a dishwasher featuring a full third-level rack which was released last year to critical and consumer acclaim.
For Bodine, innovation means “finding new ways to design products and expand our capabilities. My favorite part of the process is theoretically knowing a solution is out there and little by little capturing the innovation details,” he says. “Whirlpool values innovation and encourages us to strive for it, make time for it, and actually launch it.”
Juliano Stefanovitz, GPO Strategic Planning & PLO, KASA, & Dish says, “Thousands of Whirlpool Corp. engineers and innovators like Bodine and Masters work around the clock and across the globe to improve how consumers use its appliances to care for their families—and none of the amazing new products and product features would happen without the company’s talented design and engineering teams.”