Sydney designers unplugged: people, process, product



Nick Edmonds, Project Director, Sunbeam Australia, talks about the Mixmaster Professional

Sunbeam decided to redesign the Mixmaster because we hadn’t had a new design of a die-cast Mixmaster for at least 20 years. In those years we’d come out with plastic models but we didn’t have anything that was the good old traditional iconic Australian Mixmaster that everybody’s so familiar with. So we decided that the time was right. There was also a high interest in retro products at that point, things like the VW Beetle had just been redesigned. We saw an opportunity to capitalise on that feeling that was in the marketplace as well.

We wanted to convey a sense of power and simplicity. We even had our designers looking at things like jet engines for inspiration and you can see that in the form of the product. A lot of that was driven by the heritage of the Mixmasters in years gone by. But it also actually serves quite an important function which is cooling the motor inside. Because the product is 650 Watts, it does generate quite a lot of heat and so to keep that cool we’ve allowed a large inlet area at the front of the product and an outlet at the back. And it works much in the same way as a jet engine.

It’s very traditional for the Mixmaster to have the speed control at the rear of the product and we wanted to do that. And also the open handled design at the top of the product was very much reminiscent of the Mixmasters of the past.

It’s very satisfying to see the product out in the marketplace, my mother uses one and my wife uses one. You almost have a feeling you’ve contributed to a little bit of Australian history having worked on such an iconic product – so yes it is very satisfying.