9 Longtime Iowa Businesses That Survived by Reinventing Themselves

Picture opening a small store just 14 months after the stock market crash that started the Great Depression.

Hy-Vee did, and it wasn’t the only Iowa business that had to figure out how to last.

Here are the longtime Iowa businesses that survived by reinventing themselves.

1. Amana Woolen Mill

Amana Woolen Mill has woven wool in the Amana Colonies since 1857, long before anyone called the surrounding villages a tourist stop.

For decades, the mill ran the whole process itself: Carding, dyeing, spinning, and weaving raw wool into cloth.

The mill sold that cloth wholesale to tailors and dealers around the country.

The mill kept running through the Great Depression, too.

In 1932, the Amana Colonies split apart.

The church stayed a religious society, while the mill and the community’s other businesses became a separate for-profit company, Amana Society, Inc.

Cheaper overseas textile manufacturing finally forced the mill to change, in the early 1980s.

Amana Woolen Mill couldn’t compete.

The mill closed its carding, dyeing, and spinning operations rather than keep running a full factory it could no longer afford.

Weaving stayed in the original building, using yarn the mill now buys from other American mills instead of processing its wool.

Amana Woolen Mill leaned instead on the salesroom it had opened decades earlier.

That salesroom sells blankets and throws directly to the tourists who now visit the Amana Colonies by the hundreds of thousands each year.

That salesroom, not a wholesale order book, is what keeps the looms running today.

2. Wells Enterprises

Wells Enterprises started in Le Mars in 1913 the way many small Iowa companies did.

Fred Wells bought a horse, a wagon, and a milk delivery route for $250.

That was the whole business.

By the 1920s, Wells and his sons had started making ice cream instead of only delivering someone else’s milk.

A naming contest in nearby Sioux City then gave the new product its name: Blue Bunny.

The name outlived the route.

Wells Enterprises’ ice cream still comes out of Le Mars today, one of three Wells plants.

The other two are in Henderson, Nevada, and Dunkirk, New York.

The company now belongs to Ferrero, the Italian company behind Nutella and Tic Tac, which bought Wells in 2023.

Le Mars still calls itself the Ice Cream Capital of the World, a title tied directly to the ice cream Wells started making a hundred years ago.

3. Hy-Vee

Hy-Vee opened as a single small store in Beaconsfield, Iowa, on December 13, 1930.

That was about 14 months after the stock market crash that started the Great Depression.

Charles Hyde and David Vredenburg incorporated their store with 14 other Iowa and Missouri partners in 1938.

A 1952 naming contest gave the growing chain the name Hy-Vee, pulled from Hyde and Vredenburg’s last names.

One store became many.

Hy-Vee kept adding departments other grocers skipped, starting with a pharmacy operation in 1969.

In-store dietitians and HealthMarket sections followed in the early 2000s, then full delivery and pickup through Aisles Online in 2015.

None of that stopped discount competition from squeezing Hy-Vee’s small-town Iowa stores.

Hy-Vee’s chief executive has pointed to towns where a single Hy-Vee competes against both a Walmart Supercenter and a Dollar General, all chasing the same price-conscious shoppers.

Hy-Vee’s answer was Dollar Fresh, a discount-format store built inside former Hy-Vee and Shopko locations.

The format mixes dollar-store pricing with a full produce aisle, a meat counter, and a pharmacy.

Iowa lost 8,325 business establishments like it between March 2023 and March 2024 alone, even as 9,349 opened.

An employee trust fund set up in 1960 turned Hy-Vee’s workers into part owners of the company.

Hy-Vee now runs stores across eight Midwestern states out of its West Des Moines headquarters.

Hy-Vee remains majority employee-owned today, a structure many large U.S. grocery chains don’t share.

4. Kinze Manufacturing

Kinze Manufacturing began as a one-man welding shop in Ladora, Iowa.

Jon Kinzenbaw, a farm boy from nearby Victor, opened it in 1965, at age 21, with a small bank loan and $25 in his pocket.

He mostly repaired equipment.

A 1975 conversation with frustrated farmers changed that.

Farmers were tired of dismantling their planters just to haul them on trailers.

So Kinzenbaw designed and built a rear-fold planter instead of only fixing what farmers already owned.

The first batch sold fast.

Kinzenbaw then bought land near Williamsburg, Iowa, to build a bigger plant.

The repair shop turned manufacturer is still family owned today, run by the Kinzenbaw family out of Williamsburg.

5. Pella Corporation

Pella Corporation, based in Iowa today, traces back to 1925, when Pete and Lucille Kuyper bought a small company making a roll-up window screen.

They moved it to their hometown of Pella the next year.

Rolscreen, as the company was then called, grew fast on that one product through the 1920s and kept growing through the Depression.

Kuyper kept adding to the line anyway, patenting a wood-and-steel casement window in 1937 that eventually sold more than a million units.

Then came the 1980s.

By the late 1980s, the company’s high-end window sales had stalled as cheaper competitors captured the fast-growing market of home renovators and do-it-yourselfers shopping at big-box stores.

Pella answered with a Japanese manufacturing overhaul called kaizen starting in 1992, the same year it dropped the Rolscreen name for good.

A cheaper Proline series, sold through chains like Home Depot instead of only Pella’s dealer network, followed soon after.

Pella still manufactures windows and doors from its home state today, privately owned by the Kuyper family.

6. Vermeer Corporation

Vermeer Corporation started with a hoist Gary Vermeer built in 1943 to make unloading his grain wagon easier on his central Iowa farm.

Neighbors wanted hoists too, and a local machine shop built more of them to keep up with requests from other farmers.

By 1948, Vermeer and a cousin were manufacturing the hoist commercially out of a small factory in Pella, Iowa.

He named it Vermeer Manufacturing Company.

Then hydraulic wagon hoists hit the market.

They wiped out demand for Vermeer’s mechanical hoist within a few years of the factory opening.

Vermeer didn’t fold.

He designed a right-angled power-take-off drive for hammermills instead, a part so in demand that one small newspaper ad brought in more than 1,000 orders.

A trencher for his farm’s drainage tiling followed in 1951, then a one-person stump cutter in 1956, then the first large round hay baler in 1971.

Each new machine outgrew the last business Vermeer had built.

The company he started to sell one homemade hoist is run today by his family’s third generation, out of Pella.

7. Musco Lighting

Musco Lighting got its start in Muscatine, Iowa, in 1976.

A lawyer named Joe Crookham and an engineer named Myron Gordin bought an existing local lighting-fixture company and renamed it Musco.

Stadium lighting came later.

Musco’s early Sportscluster fixture sold well.

The shift came when Gordin built a truck-mounted mobile lighting system.

It was tested successfully at the University of Iowa’s Kinnick Stadium in 1980.

That test changed everything.

Musco Lighting is now based in Oskaloosa, Iowa.

Encyclopedia.com’s International Directory of Company Histories now calls Musco the world’s leading provider of temporary and permanent sports lighting.

That’s decades removed from the small fixture maker it once was.

8. Ruan Transportation

Ruan Transportation started in Iowa on July 4, 1932.

John Ruan’s college tuition money ran out, so he traded a family car for a dump truck to haul gravel for a local road builder.

Coal paid the bills next.

Ruan’s fleet grew to three trucks hauling coal within a year.

By 1942, it was the largest trucking business in central Iowa.

Ruan then pushed the company into hauling petroleum and general freight instead of leaning only on coal.

The gravel hauler kept growing.

By the 1950s, Ruan had grown into the country’s largest hauler of bulk petroleum.

The Des Moines company built from one dump truck still runs a national trucking and logistics operation out of its home city today.

9. West Music

West Music opened in Iowa City in 1941 as Peterson-West Music Company.

Chris Peterson and Pearl West sold instruments and sheet music from a single storefront above what is now the Airliner Restaurant.

Shelf sales weren’t enough.

Over the decades, West Music built out instrument rental programs for school band and orchestra students.

It also added repair shops and started supplying music teachers directly with classroom instruments and curriculum materials.

West Music now runs four stores in Coralville, Marion, Cedar Falls, and Davenport, plus a Dubuque service center.

It’s still family owned by the third generation.

West Music now calls itself the country’s largest supplier of elementary general music products.

A band director in Cedar Falls or Marion might order classroom rhythm instruments from West Music today.