KitchenAid’s 100 year recipe for durable design
By Matt Geiger, Franklin Guttman, Alex Heyison, and Maddy Sides
The KitchenAid stand mixer has been in American homes for more than a century. Its robust design and materials promise decades of reliable mixing. A treasured object passed down through generations of happy bakers, they’re more likely to be found at an estate sale than a landfill. Marketed as “the last mixer you’ll ever buy,” how can sales of such a durable product sustain year-over-year growth?
History
American industrial equipment company Hobart brought the KitchenAid mixer to market in 1919. Early models resembled industrial equipment and were hardly portable.
Redesigned: The Iconic “Model K”
Industrial designer Egmont Arens gave the mixer its iconic form in 1937, when Hobart released the redesigned Model K. From an outside view, almost nothing has changed since.
A look inside a KitchenAid mixer today
On the inside of any KitchenAid mixer, large motors, beefy gears, and thick-gauge wiring ensure durability and quiet operation. No matter which era your mixer is from, the components are never cheap, but time has changed the fit and finish.
Custom workmanship in the Model K has been replaced by a pre-assembled motor
While Dyson brand products boast of their modern brushless motors designs, KitchenAids still uses standard (and very reliable) brushed motors. The replaceable brushes have gotten shorter though…
Old KitchenAid motors inherently run slower at greater torque. Their modern motors are of the high-speed variety. They rely on a planetary gear system to slow down the speed and deliver more torque, which would not have been affordable in the time of the original Model K.
For speed control, mechanical governors have been replaced by microcontrollers. The component quality is good, but the board itself remains an obvious failure point in recently built machines. Further, today’s KitchenAid circuit board is left untethered to rattle around in a chassis that vibrates constantly with use.
Exterior Design
While there are subtle changes to the internal components, some aspects have been truly timeless: the iconic head cap is still manufactured in Erie, Pennsylvania using the same zinc alloy and manufacturing process as in years past.
Mixer as Mascot
When the KitchenAid mixer is gifted at a wedding or inherited from the kitchen of a dearly departed, it becomes infused with meaning. Likewise, on store shelves, the mixer radiates its potential for creating fond memories with those we love.
Operating as a mascot of legendary status, the KitchenAid stand mixer was the company’s first and most successful product; it is synonymous with and inseparable from the brand.
Today, large portions of KitchenAid’s website are devoted to the mixer, its history, and stories of multi-generational ownership—before mentioning the brand’s extensive range of other (non-mixer) products.
KitchenAid has leveraged this cult following of their mixer and its stratospheric price tag to position themselves in the housewares market as a premium brand. The mixer’s halo casts light over the brand’s other products, even those of modest build quality and design. So long as their mixers shine brightly in this space, KitchenAid will continue to ensure that their entire brand is perceived as durable and dependable as the original Model Ks.
Too durable?
Tear-downs of vintage KitchenAid mixers regularly show grease that has never been changed and years of flour caked onto the fans. Nevertheless, owners shouldn’t feel too bad about their maintenance habits (or lack thereof). Despite their reputation for excellent customer support and generous availability of replacement parts, KitchenAid leaves a noticeable gap in providing information about how to perform anything but the most basic maintenance. Even their product manuals are often hard to locate and have a laughably short paragraph on care followed by dozens of pages with quick and easy recipes. Still, one could argue that in this respect the KitchenAid’s reputation for durability actually harms its longevity. Because it never seems to falter, it dares us to neglect the occasional maintenance that it requires.
The Next 100 years
This mixer’s reusability, durability, and timeless design have made it a brand-sustaining product. Yet, KitchenAid still faces impossible competition…with itself. New retail sales of KitchenAid mixers must compete with an ever-growing market of used but perfectly functional mixers. To thrive in an economy premised on growth, the brand has introduced various features: limited editions and colors, customization options, and marketing gimmicks such as Augmented Reality. These additions offer short-term benefits to the business without meaningfully increasing the product’s durability or cultural resonance. To last another hundred years, KitchenAid must reinvest in what enabled its first century of success.
A recipe for 100 year design, inspired by KitchenAid
- It’s okay to be heavy, but it must be worth the weight.
- “Robust” and “modular” are not mutually exclusive goals.
- The point-of-sale is the first part of a long relationship.
- It should always look good — especially when it gets dirty.
- Build with meaningful upgrade paths — let the product grow with the needs of the user.
- A port, once designed, cannot be altered. Future designers must make accessories that fit.
- Repairability means supporting a replacement parts catalogue; ideally a small one.
Sources
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- Kindy, David. “For 100 Years, KitchenAid Has Been the Stand-Up Brand of Stand Mixers.” Smithsonian.com. Smithsonian Institution, August 7, 2019. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/100-years-kitchenaid-has-been-stand-brand-stand-mixers-180972838/.
- Garrett, Lizzie. “The Maker Story of KitchenAid: Maker Stories.” Maker. Accessed February 25, 2021. https://stories.maker.co/the-maker-story-of-kitchenaid.
- AvE, BOLTR: KitchenAid Mixer. SURPRISE!, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qKp-0h9P18&ab_channel=AvE
- David Kindy, “For 100 Years, KitchenAid Has Been the Stand-Up Brand of Stand Mixers,” Smithsonian Magazine, accessed February 11, 2021, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/100-years-kitchenaid-has-been-stand-brand-stand-mixers-180972838/
- One of the world’s leading zinc die casting manufacturers https://diecasting.zinc.org/castingstudy/structural-components/
- Firebat, How The KitchenAid Stand Mixer Became A Status Symbol, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgeeck_Le2I&ab_channel=CNBCMakeIt
- AppliancePartsPros, How To: Whirlpool/KitchenAid/Maytag Motor Field Assembly & Motor Armature W10870869 & WPW10315777, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7_qfIqX0dI&ab_channel=AppliancePartsPros
- AppliancePartsPros, How To: Whirlpool/KitchenAid/Maytag Planetary Assembly WP9708172, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H14BXX8tBrg&ab_channel=AppliancePartsPros
- “KitchenAid K-45 Mixer — How Old Is It?,” accessed February 22, 2021, https://www.automaticwasher.org/cgi-bin/TD/TD-VIEWTHREAD.cgi?32302_9
- Imgur, “KitchenAid Unicorn — GIF,” Imgur, accessed February 24, 2021, https://imgur.com/gallery/rRKaed4
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- “Rainbow Unicorn KitchenAid Stand Mixer,” Etsy, accessed February 24, 2021, https://www.etsy.com/listing/663563956/rainbow-unicorn-kitchenaid-stand-mixer.
