It was the 1970s, and Gary Comer was shuttling back and forth from his weekend getaway farm near Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin and Chicago, where he lived and ran a sailing supply business called Lands’ End.
But the catalog company that Comer started in his basement in 1963 was outgrowing its Chicago headquarters. He decided that rural Dodgeville, in Southwest Wisconsin, would be the best place to do business.
“I fell in love with the gently rolling hills and woods and cornfields and being able to see the changing seasons,” Comer, who died in 2006, is quoted as saying in a Lands’ End history.
Dodgeville proved to be a good fit between a company that needed seasonal help and farmer families who had time for a holiday job after the crops were harvested, said Michele Casper, longtime spokeswoman for Land’s End.
Today the Comer family still owns the Soldiers Grove farm. And Lands’ End, now a subsidiary of Sears Holdings Corp., employs about 5,000 people at its sprawling campus in Dodgeville and other locations in the state.
Most Wisconsin companies start here rather move here. But the state’s many attributes – 14,927 inland lakes, over 20 national and state forests and wilderness areas, 604 golf courses, cross-country ski trails, major league teams such as the Green Bay Packers, Milwaukee Brewers and Milwaukee Bucks, and nationally recognized performing arts venues and museums – help businesses to attract and keep good employees.
“One of the main things today is being able to describe quality of place,” said James Hill, executive director at the La Crosse Area Development Corp. “La Crosse is one of the best areas for road biking in the United States. Wisconsin maintains its roads so well.”
The Marshfield Clinic, a health care system with 57 locations and 8,000 employees across the northern part of the state, uses quality of life as a selling point to recruit physicians, said Marci Jackson, physician recruitment manager.
“You’re working where you would vacation,” Jackson. “We talk about how good the school systems are. “
Drs. Foster and Smith, an internet and catalog pet supply company, is located in Rhinelander, amid the lakes and forests of “Up North” Wisconsin, because that’s where the founders originally operated their veterinary practice.
“We have a very stable workforce,” said Race Foster, a co-founder. “They have a very strong work ethic. We don’t have any turnover.”
Milwaukee, the state’s largest city, roars when Harley owners come home to celebrate their love of the bikes made by Harley-Davidson Corp. The city rocks all summer long with Summerfest – billed as the world’s largest outdoor music festival – and ethnic festivals most weekends on Milwaukee’s lakefront. The city was recently named among the top arts cities in the nation by ArtPlace, and the shores of Lake Michigan provide ample frontage for residents and visitors to enjoy sailing, hiking, biking or a day at one of several excellent public beaches.
Since its opening in 2001, the Quadracci Pavilion addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum has become an icon. The all-white structure, designed by world-renowned architect Santiago Calatrava, features the Burke Brise Soleil with a wingspan of 217 feet. The visually arresting space has been the setting for Transformers: Dark of the Moon, ads for Toyota, Victoria’s Secret and others; the audition site when American Idol came to Milwaukee in 2010, and the backdrop for the opening movie of 2011 video game Forza Motorsport 4.
The museum’s includes nearly 25,000 works from antiquity to the present, and its collections of American decorative arts, German Expressionist prints and paintings, folk and Haitian art, and American art after 1960 are considered among the nation’s finest.
“Wisconsin and the Milwaukee area are full of great people and inviting communities that offer an exceptional quality of life, strong schools and a vibrant downtown with no shortage of things to do,” said Kevin Mansell, chairman and chief executive officer at Kohl’s Corporation, based in the Milwaukee suburb of Menomonee Falls. “We find those who might not be familiar with Milwaukee are very pleasantly surprised about how terrific of a place this is to live and work, and how much the area offers.”
Eighty miles west lies Madison, the state capital and home to UW-Madison, a top-ranked research university. Nestled on an isthmus between lakes Mendota and Monona, the city hums with the energy of students and the pulse of state government. The downtown area is a hub and spoke configuration around the state capital: the side streets are clean, pedestrian-friendly and lined with independently owned shops and restaurants.
Madison routinely takes honors for the high educational level of its citizens. In 2011, Forbes named Madison as the third-best city in the U.S. for young professionals.
Further north on Lake Michigan’s shores, the Fox Valley is home to Green Bay and the legendary Lambeau Field. Green Bay is the sixth-best small city in American to raise a family, according to Oprah Winfrey. The area serves as a gateway to Wisconsin’s “Up North” wilderness tourism offerings, from hunting and fishing to snowmobiling and camping. Thousands of vacation cabins dot quiet communities all the way to the upper peninsula and west to Duluth and Lake Superior.
In the West Central region of the state, Eau Claire, with plentiful nearby campgrounds, beaches, biking and hiking trails, is on Kiplinger’s 2012 list of Top 10 Cities for Cheapskates. The Huffington Post likes La Crosse, calling its Mississippi River Scenic Drive the best in the U.S.
Wisconsin also does well by a new measure of intelligence, as reported by Richard Florida in June 2012 at theatlanticcities.com. Two Wisconsin cities, Madison and Eau Claire, ranked among the top 25 “brainiest” cities in the U.S., according to a metric developed by Lumos Labs. The company’s tracking software measured cognitive intelligence based on performance in online games.
