At 12 years old, Jerome Caruso discovered his career when a friend of his father introduced him to industrial design, and he heard about a General Motors contest for futuristic car concepts. 

Caruso refined his design sensibilities in Europe in the 1960s. While a graduate student at the University of Copenhagen, he also worked at the city’s premier design office. “There was a sensitive approach to European design that made an indelible impression on me,” he recalls.

Deciding to go it alone, he lined up projects in Scandinavia; at age 26 he opened a practice in Brussels with clients in Belgium, England, France and Germany. Later he returned to the US and again established a one-man studio. His diverse projects ranged from spearheading Motorola’s entry into the manufacture of LCD watch modules to designing and engineering the first completely machine-produced stack chair for the US contract market (now in the American Arts collection at the Chicago Art Institute).

Caruso is most noted as Sub-Zero’s first and only designer for more than 20 years, responsible for their entire line of sophisticated refrigeration icons and industry-leading firsts, including wine storage units. He invented Sub-Zero’s revolutionary drawer-and-cabinet system, named one of the 10 best products of 1995 by Time magazine. For the 2002 début of Wolf, Sub-Zero’s corporate companion, he designed 25 new cooking appliances within 18 months.

With more than 75 design patents to his credit, Caruso takes a hands-on approach and enjoys doing it all – concepts, drawings, prototypes and engineering.