Aluminium novelties in two Wisconsin towns.

Mirro grew out of the aluminium trade of two neighbouring towns in Wisconsin. The Manitowoc County Historical Society wrote in 2017 that the company’s roots began in 1893, when Joseph Koenig of Two Rivers travelled to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and saw products made of aluminium on display, while Henry Vits of Manitowoc set up a shop to make aluminium products at about the same time. English Wikipedia dates Koenig’s Aluminum Manufacturing Company to 1895 and Vits’s Manitowoc Aluminum Novelty Company to 1898.

In 1909 those two businesses merged with the New Jersey Aluminum Company of Newark to form the Aluminum Goods Manufacturing Company, known locally as “the Goods”, according to the society. Wikipedia, citing the Manitowoc Daily Herald, says the merged company was headquartered in Manitowoc with Vits as president and Koenig as vice president, and that all of its offices and manufacturing moved to Manitowoc in 1910. The society quotes Leonora Kadow’s monograph for the society on the history of aluminium: mass production of cooking utensils began in 1913 with a double boiler made for the Quaker Oats Company, and until then the business had been mainly novelties, with aluminium combs its principal product.

Before Mirro there was Viko. The society says a line of pots and pans took its name from the founders, “Vi” from Vits and “Ko” from Koenig. By 1915 the company had a contract for automobile hub caps, and during World War I its production turned to canteens, cooking utensils and mess kits. Wikipedia, citing a 1911 report in the Manitowoc Daily Herald and a patent granted in 1913, says Koenig developed an aluminium canteen for the army, and that in 1915 the company acquired the facilities of the Standard Aluminum Company, another manufacturer in Two Rivers.

A national brand, a new name and new owners.

The Mirro line was launched in 1917, the society says, as a nationally advertised brand line, with full-page advertisements in the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens. George Vits was president at the time, and the society describes an annual company picnic that began with a parade and went on with games for children and entertainment. The Depression cut employment at the plants, and by 1940 the company was involved in national defence work, making items that ran from coffee filters and meat platters to aircraft fuel tanks and cartridge cases.

After the Second World War, Wikipedia says, the company moved into aluminium toys such as the Sno-Coaster, a saucer-shaped sled. On 10 April 1957 stockholders voted to change the company’s name to the Mirro Aluminum Company, the society says, so the business took the name of its brand forty years after the brand appeared. In 1958, according to Wikipedia citing the Manitowoc Herald Times, Mirro began building 16-foot aluminium boats under the Mirro-Craft name, designed by the naval architect David Beach. It bought the fibreglass boat maker Cruisers, Inc. of Oconto, Wisconsin, in late 1971, and in 1982 the boat business was bought by employees, who formed Northport, Inc. in Gillett, Wisconsin, and took the Mirro-Craft name with them.

On 15 July 1983 Mirro was acquired by the Newell Company of Freeport, Illinois, the society says; Newell went on to buy Manitowoc’s Aluminum Specialty Company in 1984 and the WearEver company in 1989. In May 2001 corporate offices moved to Ohio, and production in Manitowoc later came to an end. Glass Online reported on 21 April 2004 that Global Home Products, LLC had completed its acquisition of Mirro Cookware, together with other housewares businesses, from Newell Rubbermaid on 14 April 2004. In January 2007 CercleFinance reported that Groupe SEB’s 2006 sales in North America included the American company Mirro WearEver, consolidated from mid-August 2006. Groupe SEB, the French owner of Tefal, lists Mirro among its brands today, describing it as an American brand with a comprehensive cookware range.

Design and documentation.

Cookware reaches most people through a shop shelf before it reaches a stove, so a pan’s identity is carried first by its packaging. A box or sleeve usually shows the piece from above or at an angle, names the range and the collection, and gives the brand a fixed corner where the logo sits from one product to the next. Colour on the box often signals the range rather than the company, which lets one maker run several lines side by side without each one looking like the others.

Smaller printed pieces carry the name once the box is gone. Hang-tags and card wraps travel with pans sold loose on a rail, while the underside of a pan or the end of a handle may carry a stamped or cast mark that stays with the piece for as long as it is used. Those small marks are where a name is most often seen at home.

Each guide in this group sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how its name has been presented, and separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself.

A brand line that renamed its maker.

The Mirro identity began as a brand line rather than a company name. The society dates the brand to 1917 and the company’s adoption of it to 1957; in between, the company traded as the Aluminum Goods Manufacturing Company while its cookware carried the Mirro name in national magazines. Before it, the Viko line had joined two founders’ surnames into one word. The Mirro name also travelled beyond the kitchen: Wikipedia says the Mirro-Craft trademark was renewed in 2009 by Northport Marine of Gillett, Wisconsin, while the Mirro trademark itself was registered to Groupe SEB by July 2014.

The old factories had their own afterlife. Wikipedia, citing the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2005, says the Mirro plant on Mirro Drive in Manitowoc was bought by Koenig & Vits, Inc., which formed an alliance in 2005 with the Brazilian cookware and cutlery maker Tramontina to make cookware there, and that the closure of that plant was announced in July 2019. Part of the old downtown plant on Washington Street has been demolished, and the Manitowoc County Historical Society marked the closing chapter of the company’s Plant 2 there in its 2017 article. The current Mirro website, run by Groupe SEB, promotes MIRRO pressure canners for preserving fruit, vegetables, meat and sauces, and writes the name in capitals.

For a design guide, Mirro shows how a short, coined brand word, launched with full-page advertisements in national magazines, can outlast the founders’ own names, become the name of the company and then pass through three owners in a little over twenty years. Compare it with Tefal and All-Clad, two other cookware brands of Groupe SEB. For this guide we use lakeshore navy, spun aluminium and kettle red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Mirro’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.