“The Best Kitchen Aid I’ve Ever Had”: The Design and Evolution of the KitchenAid Mixer
The Design Evolution
The first food I enjoyed making on my own was chocolate chip cookies. I loved measuring out the ingredients and sneaking a few chocolate chips as a treat as I assembled the dough. However, my favorite part about making cookies was that it gave me a chance to use our KitchenAid mixer that always sat on my kitchen counter enticing me to bake. Our KitchenAid mixer stood out to me among all of our other appliances. It was glossy and bright red, a stark change from the entirely white, black, and chrome food processor, Crock Pot, and rice cooker that were hidden away in our cabinets, below where the KitchenAid sat displayed on our counter. Its curved sleek design –absent of sharp edges or corners– made it both aesthetic to look at and satisfying to use. That red KitchenAid mixer that is still a staple in my family kitchen to this day is actually the exact same model as the mixer that KitchenAid sold over 80 years ago. However, KitchenAid didn’t start out with its iconic mixer that has since been endorsed by Julia Child and Martha Steward and even selected by the SFMOMA as an “icon of American Design” when they first started making mixers in 1914. The company had to go through the typical process of production, testing, and iteration to land on the design we know and love today.
Like I mentioned before, the story of KitchenAid starts in 1914. The story goes, Herbert Johnson was watching a baker strain their arm mixing huge batches of bread with a heavy, iron spoon and thought to himself there had to be a better, more mechanical way to complete this arduous task. Soon after, Hobart, the American producer of commercial foodservice and grocery equipment, began producing Herbert’s design for an 80-quart industrial Model H mixer.
The mixer became a staple in large-scale and commercial bakeries and was eventually used in every ship kitchen in the US Navy during WWI. The innovative feature that set this mixer apart from other mixers on the market was its hydraulic system that allowed users to move the bowl up for mixing and down to easily pour in ingredients. It also allowed users to raise up the bowl to a comfortable height that made it much easier to pick it up a heavy bowl from the the mixer without causing back strain.
Following the Model H, Hobart soon began to realize there was a push for an at home version of the mixer, because the current model was only suited for industrial sized kitchens. Cue the C-10. This smaller mixer, designed in 1918 was specifically designed and marketed for housewives. It also inspired the conception of the official company name. While it is unclear if this is only legend, apparently an employee at Hobart tested out the mixer with the wife of a sales manager at the company and she told them “I don’t care what you call it, it’s the best kitchen aid I’ve ever had”. When the mixer hit the market and stores refused to sell the mixer, Hobart even employed an all-female team of door-to-door salespeople to appeal to housewives across the country. While the mixer had undeniably good quality, it was a difficult sell because it was very expensive. It was obvious that some more design iterations were necessary to find a best-selling product.
A few years later in 1922, KitchenAid introduced the H-5, a 5-quart mixer that was 65 pounds and 26 inches tall. This mixer still broke the bank and clocked in around $2800 in today’s dollars. A few years later they rolled out the G-Model. This model was more successful at appealing to housewives because it was much lighter — weighing about half as much as the H-5 that came before it. The relative success showed in the numbers, and KitchenAid sold about 20,000 units in the first 3 years of selling the G model.
However, around this time KitchenAid began facing heavy competition from the Sunbeam Mixmaster. In 1930, SunBeam put out the Mixmaster stand mixer, and it quickly became the most popular small kitchen appliance sold in the United States. Despite being attractive to consumers for its convenience and durability, the Mixmaster had a big weakness: its aesthetic appearance. The appearance of the mixer was seen as too utilitarian and strictly mechanical. If KitchenAid was going to truly differentiate itself from the competition, it would have ramp up the aesthetics. So in 1937, they went to Egmont Arens.
Although KitchenAid had been making stand mixers for over two decades at this point, many people point to Arens as the real origin of the KitchenAid legacy. Arens worked as an industrial designer and was the art director of Vanity Fair at the time he was commissioned by KitchenAid to design a low-cost mixer that could be used in every kitchen across America. KitchenAid wanted this mixer to be the perfect balance of aesthetics and practicality. The timeless model K mixer that he designed would go on to become a huge hit and is the mixer design we still see on store shelves today, unchanged from the Model K Arens put out in 1937.
The Model K
The Model K was designed with a modernist style. Modernism is a design principle that was defined by sleek, clean lines and rejected the addition of any ornaments or embellishments for the sake of decoration. This post-war style was in direct contrast to the ornate styles that came before it; necessity and purpose were key. The mixer features a beater head that moves in a planetary orbital rotation in two directions. It features a hub on the front of the head of the mixer that has had the same design as the hub on the very first C-10 mixer from 1918. This hub mechanism is used for securing attachments into the base of the mixer. While the base design has remained unchanged for about 80 years, the ability to add on dozens of different attachments has allowed the mixer to stay relevant and adapt to trends. Throughout the years KitchenAid has strategically put out different attachments that capitalize on the food trends that are popular at the time. For example, a vegetable spiralizer attachment was put out recently in response to increasing trends towards plant-based diets.
The hub also makes the mixer a truly all-in-one device because it easily adapts to many use cases. Some of the bases are designed to have a tilting head that tilts back to allow easy ingredient additions to the metal bowl. These specific mixers also feature a twisting lock mechanism that secures the bowl into the base so that it doesn’t move when mixing.
The Gendered Design of Kitchen Appliances
Throughout the evolution of the KitchenAid mixer, we have seen that the company made strategic design choices in response to changes in the market. But it’s important to also recognize that throughout the past century the gender makeup of the KitchenAid user base has skewed to be less female-centric. According to a study in the Nutrition Journal in 2013, the percentage of American women who cook has dropped from 92% to 70% from the mid-1960s to the late 2000s, while the percentage of men who cook has increased from 25% to 40% in the same time period. Gender can play a large role in how physical products are designed for usability. In analyzing the design evolution of the KitchenAid mixer, it is important to acknowledge the effect the demographic shift in the kitchen appliance market from solely housewives to both male and female at home-cooks has had on the design choices KitchenAid made.
To start, the design of the KitchenAid as an “all-in-one” mixer is inherently gendered. Throughout the early 20th century there was a fairly universal idea that cooking was seen as a chore for women. Today, we live in a culture of celebrity chefs, cooking for passion, and buying couples Italian cooking classes as an anniversary gift, but back in the early 1900s cooking was seen as a burden that entirely fell on the wife. We see this ideal even in the design of kitchen layouts. Whereas open-concept kitchens that give ample space for two cooks as well as guests to socialize and congregate around the kitchen are popular today, for the first half of the 20th century, kitchens were designed to be small and practical. The wife was to be secluded alone in the kitchen to prepare the food that she would then bring out to the family’s guest. With cooking being seen as an arduous task in the early 1900s, the push for easy all-in-one kitchen appliances was high. Especially because in 1925, 23% of women had entered the workforce which gave them less time to complete household chores. Statistically speaking, in 1900, households spent on average 58 hours per week on housework but by the 1970s that time had dropped to only 18 hours a week. Along with the KitchenAid and SunBeam MixMaster, at this time we saw the rise of appliances like microwaves, Crock Pots, and dish washers that were intended to cut down on the amount of time that women spent in the kitchen.
Looking more into Crock Pots, over the years Crock Pots have seen an interesting evolution in response to gender that illuminates a similar change in KitchenAid mixers. In her essay “The Man’s Man’s Kitchen.”, Ashley Fetters outlines her observed change in the Crock Pots. In the 1970s Crock Pots were designed to be “feminine, colorful, and floral”, however the sale of slow cookers experienced a decline around the 1990s. When they came back in the 2000s they had to try a new design: a sleek, black and chrome model to appeal to their new, male user base. They even came out with a line of Crock Pots with designs based off of NFL teams. This new strategy to target towards the male market caused their sales to increase by 30%.
We can see a similar change in the design of the KitchenAid mixer. In 1955, KitchenAid made the first and only change to Arens’s initial design by introducing colorful versions of the mixer. This iteration came at a time when color-coordinated kitchens were becoming all the rage with housewives. Appliances with colors like “Stratford yellow” and “Turquoise green” were incredibly popular in the 1950s, while colors like “Charcoal Gray” had such a hard time selling that they were slowly phased out of production. The colors of Model K eventually came to include 40 different powder-coated colors.
The colors were specifically designed to have a “friendly-quality”. KitchenAid did not want the colors to feel high-tech or as if they were only popular because of passing fads. They also intentionally chose to add color to their mixers because they wanted the mixers to be decorations for a counter instead of hidden away in cabinets or shelves. This was in part a strategic choice in response to design changes in kitchens. In the early 1900s, many kitchens did not have a lot of cabinet space, so having an appliance that was both beautiful and functional was ideal. KitchenAid marketing director, Brian Maynard, stated in 2007 that “our research tells us that many less avid cooks simply want one on their countertop, largely because they like its design.”
However, today we see a push back against the initial color trend with an increased popularity in chrome and black KitchenAid mixer models. Recently, GQ even put out a roundup of the Best Stuff of 2017. On it was a limited-edition “Black Tie” KitchenAid stand mixer whose “ “matte-black finish makes baking cookies seem like an even darker art than usual” and was selling for over $1000.
The KitchenAid mixer has had to evolve and adapt to changes in their demographics and trends in the market since its conception. However at its core, the design of the Model K base has not changed for over 80 years. This is a testament to the timeless and adaptable mixer that Egmont Arens designed in 1937 . Arens had been known at the time for his ability to turn practical devices into works of art. That skill is well exemplified in the KitchenAid Model K. The fact that with large changes to the gender makeup of the kitchen appliance market, KitchenAid has only had to make changes to the color of the mixer or put out a new trendy attachment to stay relevant says a lot about the Arens’s strength at designing for durability and adaptability. When it comes to the design of the Model K mixer, Egmont Arens was truly ahead of his time.
Sources:
Angelicola, Karen. “Women and Appliance Design.” ArcGIS StoryMaps, Esri, 15 Dec. 2019, storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/96c3c686c827494bb6acbbb02374483b.
Buckley, Cheryl. “Made in Patriarchy: Toward a Feminist Analysis of Women and Design.” Design Issues, vol. 3, no. 2, 1986, pp. 3–14. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1511480. Accessed 9 June 2020.
Ball, Aimee Lee. “A Brief History of the Stand Mixer.” Martha Stewart, 21 Mar. 2019, www.marthastewart.com/1537760/stand-mixer-history-kitchenaid.
Fetters, Ashley. “The Man’s Man’s Kitchen.” Curbed, Curbed, 31 Jan. 2018, www.curbed.com/2018/1/31/16952460/kitchen-appliances-design-gender-men.
“History.” Sunbeam, www.sunbeam.com/history.html.
Kindy, David. “For 100 Years, KitchenAid Has Been the Stand-Up Brand of Stand Mixers.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 7 Aug. 2019, www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/100-years-kitchenaid-has-been-stand-brand-stand-mixers-180972838/.
Maker. “The Maker Story of KitchenAid.” Maker Stories, 4 June 2020, stories.maker.co/the-maker-story-of-kitchenaid/.
Sterjova, Milica. “Nearly a Century of History: The KitchenAid Stand Mixer.” Walls with Stories, 11 Apr. 2020, www.wallswithstories.com/houses/kitchenaid.html.
“V&A · What Was Modernism?” Victoria and Albert Museum, www.vam.ac.uk/articles/what-was-modernism.
Pictures:
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