The story begins in 1908, when Herbert Johnston, an engineer at the Hobart Manufacturing Company, watched a baker labouring over a heavy bowl of dough with an iron spoon and concluded the work could be done better by machine. His patent was granted in 1918, and in 1919 the first domestic model reached kitchens - the year KitchenAid marks as the birth of the stand mixer.

The object we recognise today was drawn in 1937 by Egmont Arens, one of the founding figures of American industrial design.

Arens’ Model K gave the machine its streamlined profile for the first time - the curved head, the tapering column, the planted base - and that silhouette has survived nearly a century of production with remarkably little change. In 1997, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art selected the KitchenAid stand mixer as an icon of American design.

Seven decades of colour

KitchenAid has been a pioneer in colour since 1955. When the first domestic mixer was introduced in 1919, it came in a single finish: white. That changed in 1955 when KitchenAid introduced four colours, establishing colour as a design decision rather than a decorative afterthought - a philosophy the brand has continued to develop and one now formalised in its annual Colour of the Year programme.

Today, the KitchenAid stand mixer is available in the widest range of colours on the market, reflecting the brand’s enduring belief that an appliance can be as expressive as it is functional. The Design Series takes this philosophy a step further, blurring the lines between appliance and art through colour, texture and premium materials, transforming one of the kitchen’s most recognised appliances into a sculptural centrepiece designed to inspire creativity every day.

What is the Design Series?

Released in limited editions rather than as a permanent line, each Design Series model is conceived as a collector’s piece and sits apart from the core range. Where the Colour of the Year is an annual statement of mood, the Design Series is a limited release in which the silhouette is fixed; innovation happens instead in the surfaces – in finish, texture and weight, in the way a material meets the eye and the hand, and in the way light behaves across it. The previous edition, Evergreen, arrived in 2024.

Meet the designer: Brittni Pertijs

The designer behind the 2026 Design Series is Brittni Pertijs, KitchenAid’s Lead Colour, Material and Finish Designer.

Pertijs comments: “Colour, material and finish design is the most consequential discipline in product design. It determines not what an object is, but how it looks and feels to live with. It encompasses the development of individual palettes and the finishes that bring them to life - the difference between a colour that photographs well and one that still looks right in a north-facing kitchen in February.”

The KitchenAid Artisan Tilt-Head Stand Mixer is the world’s number one mixing brand and its enduring design continues to inspire generations of home cooks and bakers.

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