Chicago Flexible Shaft, the Princess iron and the Mixmaster.

Sunbeam is an American small-appliance brand owned today by Newell Brands, through its subsidiary Sunbeam Products, which English Wikipedia places in Boca Raton, Florida. Its origins are in Chicago. In 1897, English Wikipedia says, John K. Stewart and Thomas J. Clark incorporated the Chicago Flexible Shaft Company, which made horse-clipping and sheep-shearing machinery driven by flexible shafts.

The appliance name arrived in 1910, when, by the same account, the company produced a Sunbeam-branded household appliance, the Princess Electric Iron. The name came from a company-wide contest to rebrand the growing home-appliance business, won by Edwin J. Gallagher, a buyer and traffic manager at the company. The corporate name itself did not follow for decades: English Wikipedia, citing a 2009 business-ethics textbook, says the company did not officially change its name to Sunbeam until 1946.

The product that defined the brand came from its in-house designers. English Wikipedia says the company’s head designer, the Swedish immigrant Ivar Jepson, developed the Mixmaster with Bernard Alton Graham, and that it was introduced in 1930 with two detachable beaters whose blades interlocked. The mixer sat over a bowl on a free-running turntable, unclipped from its stand to work as a hand mixer, and took attachments including a juice extractor, a meat grinder and a slicer-shredder. English Wikipedia calls it the company’s flagship product for the next forty years; a cosmological model of the early universe, the Mixmaster universe, was named after it.

Other names followed in the Sunbeam range. English Wikipedia lists the Coffeemaster vacuum coffee brewer, sold from 1938 to 1964, the Sunbeam CG waffle iron and the automatic T-20 toaster. It also credits much of the brand’s mid-century look to the industrial designer Robert Davol Budlong, whose work for Sunbeam included toasters, coffee makers and electric shavers.

Oster, Allegheny, American Household, Jarden and Newell.

Sunbeam grew by acquisition after the Second World War. English Wikipedia says it bought the Rain King sprinkler company and, in 1960, the John Oster Manufacturing Company, best known for Osterizer blenders, a date it supports with a 1988 Chicago Tribune report. In 1981 Sunbeam was bought by Allegheny International of Pittsburgh; most of the Chicago-area factories were closed and the headquarters moved to Pittsburgh.

The following decades brought repeated restructuring. English Wikipedia says Allegheny filed for Chapter 11 in 1988, that the investment group Japonica Partners bought its remains in 1989 and renamed the business Sunbeam-Oster Company, and that the headquarters moved to Providence, Rhode Island, and then to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a move The New York Times reported in October 1993. Sunbeam filed for Chapter 11 in February 2001. In 2002 it emerged as American Household, Inc., and its household-products division became the subsidiary Sunbeam Products, Inc.

Ownership has since passed to two larger consumer-goods groups. English Wikipedia says American Household was bought by Jarden Corporation in September 2004, and that Jarden was in turn bought by Newell Rubbermaid to form Newell Brands in 2016. Newell Brands has owned Sunbeam since that 2016 deal. English Wikipedia also says Sunbeam licenses some products, including heated bedding and irons, to SEG Products, a Montreal consumer-goods company.

Australia and New Zealand followed a separate path for most of a century. English Wikipedia’s article on Sunbeam Australia says the business began in 1902 as a branch of the Chicago Flexible Shaft Company, was renamed Cooper Engineering Company and then Sunbeam Corporation in 1946, listed in 1952 and came into Australian ownership in 1987; it was bought by GUD Holdings in 1996. Appliance Retailer reported on 17 April 2016 that the US company Sunbeam Products, trading as Jarden Consumer Solutions, had bought 49 per cent of the Australian business in November 2014 and that GUD was selling it the remaining stake, with completion expected in July 2016. The same report said the US company had been the global owner of the Sunbeam brand except in Australia and New Zealand. The Australian website’s footer now reads “© 2025 Newell Australia Pty Ltd or its affiliates.”

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make small kitchen and home appliances: toasters, slow cookers, pressure cookers, mixers, coffee makers, fans and heaters. Names like these often sit at many different points in the trade, from companies that still carry a founder’s name or a home town to brands that have passed through several owners and now belong to much larger housewares or consumer-products groups.

A small-appliance brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a name, a logo and a familiar look on the shelf, because the company behind that name may have been sold, merged or split, and its products may now be designed and made far from where the brand began. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its appliances are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Jepson, Budlong and an Australian design line.

Sunbeam’s design history is unusually well attached to named people. English Wikipedia credits staff designer Ivar Jepson with the Mixmaster and says that the brand also became known for designs, mainly by Robert Davol Budlong, of toasters, coffee makers and electric shavers. Its article on Budlong, a Chicago-based consultant who also designed radios for Zenith, says he designed the T-20 toaster in 1950, an automatic model that lowered the bread and raised it again when done, and worked with Jepson on the Shavemaster electric shaver of the same year, which had a smooth, rounded head shaped to sit in the palm of the hand.

English Wikipedia describes the Mixmaster’s long run of models and attachments, and instruction manuals for models such as the 9B and the A24 are among the sources it cites.

Australia developed a design line of its own. English Wikipedia’s Sunbeam Australia article says the American-designed Mixmaster 9B was made and sold in Australia from 1948, and, citing the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, that from the late 1970s Australian industrial designers were hired to create new designs. It adds that the Australian company licensed designs to other companies, including Sunbeam Products in the United States, among them the Mixmaster Professional, sold in the US as the Heritage Series stand mixer. Today the Australian website opens its about page with the line “It starts with Sunbeam” and a short essay on making life feel “effortless.”

The brand has also lived alongside a sister name for more than sixty years. Oster joined Sunbeam in 1960, the merged company traded as Sunbeam-Oster in the 1990s, and both names now sit under Newell Brands.

For a design guide, Sunbeam shows how a name chosen in an internal contest became attached to a single machine, the Mixmaster, and how one brand could be run by separate owners in two hemispheres and then reunited. Compare it with Oster, its stablemate since 1960, and with Holmes, another Jarden-era brand now under Newell. For this guide we use amber, gold and navy with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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