The Story Of Kenmore’s Style Makeover

A new Kenmore style has emerged. And you helped us design and create it. Now see how it all came together.

Our Source of Inspiration

2010 marks the year of a major design transformation for Kenmore. The first products to launch are our high style, family-friendly laundry appliances. The metamorphosis began two years ago when our design team traveled the world for inspiration, seeking out the cutting edge trends in Milan, Seoul, LA, Chicago, New York, and more.

Discovering What You Needed Most

After uncovering the state of the art in technology, materials, forms, and finishes, we continued our detective work inside American homes, studying laundry rooms and kitchens, observing families in action to gauge what worked and didn’t work with their appliances.

Back To The Drawing Board

From those insights, we created hundreds of sketches then life-size prototypes and showed these to “forward-thinker families” who helped us understand today’s modern lifestyle. We listened to feedback on making our products easier to use for all family members and developing performance features that were most important while also being the ideal of chic, smart, affordable design to fit any décor.

Families Put Kenmore To The Test

The final stage of our journey was to evaluate our designs in relation to other brands to see what customers thought of our new look. We did this anonymously, with our models set among current competitor laundry machines to get a true, unbiased perspective.

Hundreds of interviews were conducted on the east coast, mid west, and west coast. We heard “Sleek”, “Modern”, ‘Surprising Style”, ‘Wow!” time and again from those sessions. Do you know what the final research revealed? The new Kenmore products were the favorite; most preferred #1 designs!

Then from all our trend-trekking and design research we created these features:

• the latest technologies like our smooth-touch control panel
• unique deluxe materials such as our metallic chocolate and graphite doors
• high quality touch points including our fabulous cast aluminum knob with wave grip
• magical sensory elements like our blue LED lighting and pleasant, friendly sounds
• sleek, modern, easy clean surfaces
• easy read, intuitive controls punctuated by our new Kenmore logo badge
• trend-right colors inspired from nature: ginger, chili pepper red, and classic white

On A Personal Note

As a busy working mom of three active kids, I do a lot of laundry. And as the design leader for Kenmore, I felt my mission was to make our laundry collection so gorgeous and easy-to-use that the task of doing the wash was more fun for my fellow moms.

Always on the lookout for what’s in vogue in the world of fashion, jewelry, interiors, furniture and technology and understanding that the products we buy are a reflection of taste, I wanted our customers to be able to proudly show-off their new Kenmore appliances like a fantastic piece of furniture or work of art.

As the year unfolds, you will see an exciting array of new products that have world’s first technologies and stunning design. These were inspired by cues found in super-premium appliances and the latest trends from around the globe, but offered from Kenmore at affordable prices.

We are very excited to introduce you to the first of these groundbreaking appliances, our new Kenmore laundry products, the most stylish and innovative on the market, backed by our famous 82-year track record of reliability, value, service, and great performance.

I invite you to see what else is new about Kenmore appliances on our YouTube Channel.

Thanks and Enjoy!