Toast­ing Our Own

Brown­ing bread, con­tro­ver­sies and cop­ies, a New Zea­l­and his­tory. By Michael Smythe.

The Ulti­mate Ecko toaster, 1971, designed by Gif­ford Jackson.

Elec­trical appli­ances for brown­ing bread in New Zea­l­and began life in the 1930s as Kiwi cop­ies of new-fangled products seen in over­seas magazines. The import restric­tions that spawned the cop­ies provided a found­a­tion for local man­u­fac­tur­ing and were still in force as the first crop of indus­trial design gradu­ates found their way into industry in the late 1960s.
When Gerry Luh­man joined Zip Indus­tries in 1968, the com­pany was mak­ing a copy of an Amer­ican pop-up toaster that reeked of ‘styling’ – the anti­thesis of ‘good design’. While Mur­ray Kendon upgraded the mech­an­ism, Gerry designed an impress­ively robust body that was much more suited to New Zea­l­and man­u­fac­tur­ing volumes and con­sist­ent with the hard-edged, con­fid­ent Zip cor­por­ate iden­tity that he had also designed. Reflect­ing his train­ing at the hands of Nol ‘ana­lysis, ana­lysis, ana­lysis’ Ben­ner at the Wel­ling­ton Poly­tech­nic School of Design, his design was a rational response to the brief. Rather than being formed by an expens­ive press tool, the stain­less steel was blanked, shallow-pressed and fol­ded. The logical choice for the end pan­els was com­pres­sion moul­ded phen­olic resin. The new Zip toaster was a com­mer­cial suc­cess and met the stand­ard required for the Design Council’s Design­mark.
In 1995 the Wel­ling­ton City Gal­lery moun­ted an exhib­i­tion called “Objects of Desire: selec­ted New Zea­l­and design” for which invited “prac­ti­tion­ers, per­son­al­it­ies and cul­tural com­ment­at­ors” to select one item each. Archi­tect Gor­don Moller chose the Zip toaster. In a cata­logue essay, Douglas Lloyd Jen­kins, a Car­ring­ton Poly­tech­nic gradu­ate, appeared to belittle “our first indus­trial design­ers”, who had emerged from Wel­ling­ton Poly­tech­nic and Elam in the late 1960s, when he wrote: "The indi­vidual prom­in­ence of these design­ers how­ever, is beside the point … the aes­thetic pro­gramme to which they pre­scribe almost requires anonym­ity. The res­ult of this cli­mate of inter­na­tion­al­ism was an indus­trial design that says little about the New Zea­l­and con­di­tion – except that is, in the aes­thetic con­ces­sions design­ers made to sat­isfy a con­ser­vat­ive mar­ket."
It is true that Wel­ling­ton Poly­tech­nic design stu­dents were taught to eschew ego and self-expression and apply their cre­at­ive skills to other people’s needs. They hap­pily bought into the form-follows-function mod­ern­ist ethos – pro­ject briefs informed the form and fol­low­ing trends was for fash­ion design­ers, not indus­trial design­ers! Lloyd Jen­kins con­tin­ued:
"At best the New Zea­l­and [Indus­trial] Design Coun­cil sanc­ti­fied ‘good design’ which centred on solv­ing prob­lems asso­ci­ated with the primary indus­tries, for instance new trans­formers for elec­tric fences. At worst the Coun­cil pro­moted com­prom­ised cop­ies of inter­na­tional mod­els, through the now largely for­got­ten Duke of Edin­burgh Design Awards."
For the record, it was the Prince Philip Design Awards that our Design Coun­cil intro­duced – but not until 1981. Lloyd Jen­kins offered no evid­ence to sup­port his opin­ion. A review of PPDA final­ists and win­ners reveals none that could be described as a “com­prom­ised copy” of an over­seas product. Some­how the dis­missive remarks were inter­preted as imply­ing that Gerry Luh­man had pro­duced a same-only-worse imit­a­tion of a Ger­man Braun toaster. Luh­man, like any of his fel­low gradu­ates, would have regarded such a sug­ges­tion as the worst pos­sible insult – any­one who copied, or styled, was simply not an indus­trial designer! Luh­man had dili­gently designed from first prin­ciples only to have some auda­cious critic com­pare, but not con­trast, his work with an exist­ing product. Legal action ensued. A detailed account of the issues raised can­not be provided because the out of court set­tle­ment required those involved to speak no more of it.
One of Lloyd Jen­kins’ lec­tur­ers at the Car­ring­ton course was Gif­ford Jack­son who unapo­lo­get­ic­ally embraced styl­ing as part of design and astutely cat­egor­ised its trends. Jack­son would have described the style he applied to the four-slice pop-up toaster he designed for Ulti­mate Ecko in 1971 as ‘the new ration­al­ism’. The reflector toaster designed in 1967, which catered for the sud­den pop­ular­ity of grilling top­pings on toast, com­bined ‘taper­form’ and ‘sheer look’ styl­ing.
Ralta, a Palmer­ston North man­u­fac­turer of elec­trical appli­ances, entered the toaster race with some­thing seen as refresh­ingly ori­ginal – a design that flipped the toast out of each side instead of pop­ping it out the top like most oth­ers. It can now be revealed that a Ralta exec­ut­ive brought samples back from the 1972 Cologne Fair. They were taken apart and the draw­ing office, which did not include an indus­trial designer, pre­pared work­ing draw­ings. Ralta engin­eers wanted to make modi­fic­a­tions to suit the less soph­ist­ic­ated equip­ment and lower volumes but the boss insisted on an exact copy: this was Ger­man design so how could New Zeal­anders pos­sibly improve it?
The mar­ket respon­ded well to the orange exter­ior, but it was unre­li­able in prac­tice. Retail­ers were soon field­ing com­plaints and Ralta with­drew the product. Was the Zip sideways-flip toaster, with its simple fault-free manual oper­a­tion, New Zealand’s most ori­ginal toaster design?

Ralta toaster with side­ways flip action, copied from a Ger­man product circa 1972 (pho­to­graph: South Otago Museum).

Zip Auto­matic pop-up toaster, 1968, designed by Gerry Luh­man and Mur­ray Kendon (pho­to­graph: Art+Object).

Zip manual toaster (pho­to­graph: Art+Object).

Zip Auto­matic pop-up toaster (pho­to­graph: Bina Klose).

Kiwi Nug­gets stor­ies are works in pro­gress. Read­ers are invited to col­lab­or­ate in the ongo­ing pro­cess of dig­ging deeper, cre­at­ing con­text and pol­ish­ing per­cep­tions. What we know, and what we still want to know, on each story will be pos­ted on: www.creationz.co.nz

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: City Gal­lery, Wel­ling­ton, for Objects of Desire cata­logue. Ernie Nor­ris, Bill Burnby and Roger Cheer for Ralta story. Designscape 12, March 1970, for ‘The High Style’ art­icle by Gif­ford Jackson.

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