A 50-year design heritage, rebuilt into one platform and three multi-functional products.
Aksu had built contact grills for fifty years. Vintage wasn't a request for a new product — it was a request to revisit where the company started, and rebuild that DNA with the manufacturing capabilities of today.
The brief grew beyond a single object into a platform: one mechanical and structural foundation flexible enough to become three distinct products — Vintage, Grillo, and a dedicated Waffle Maker — through small, deliberate variations, without tripling the investment.
We started by going back fifty years — to Aksu's first contact grill — and asked what of that original design still mattered today. The answer became Vintage: a retrospective form rebuilt with current technology, fixed embedded-resistance plates, and accurate thermostat control hidden under a deliberately nostalgic shell.
Once that core mechanism worked, the question for every additional model became: what's the smallest change that creates the largest difference? Grillo took the same platform and added adjustable temperature control for users who wanted more precision. The Waffle Maker carried the difference further, with a separate, more compact leg design built around dedicated round plates.
Fifty years of grilling, redesigned into one honest idea.
Idea
The aim was to design a compact contact grill — in the size of a mini toaster — capable of the cooking performance you'd expect from a much larger industrial unit. Heating, grilling, toasting, all at the right performance, all packed into something you can store standing up.
The idea was inspired directly by Aksu's first contact grill, fifty years prior. Innovative additions — the fat tray, the inclined legs, the height adjuster — let it match what big appliances do, without the footprint.
Form
It's not hard to understand why it's called Vintage. The curvy, shell-like body is finished across a range from bright red to matte black, depending on the final product. The handle is a single piece of aluminum, outlined around the main body with deliberately visible screws — a vintage detail kept intentional, not accidental.
The wide base gives the unit a strong, settled stance, completed by an integrated metal fat tray that keeps the silhouette clean rather than functional-looking.
Function
Fixed plates with embedded resistance deliver more consistent cooking than a standard hinged toaster, and the inclined rear with integrated fat tray keeps grilling genuinely healthier — fat drains where it should, not where it pools.
A modified locking mechanism lets you adjust the upper plate's height, so the same unit handles a thin slice of toast and a thick steak with equal control. High-quality coating makes cleaning straightforward, and the lock allows vertical storage — solving the counter-space problem most compact appliances never address.
Differentiation
This wasn't a new product chasing a trend — it was a holistic decision to design Aksu's newest product around its own origin. It's a statement of how long the company has been in this business, and a way to prove technological expertise inside a deliberately timeless form.
From that single body, Aksu now offers three distinct models — fixed-thermostat, adjustable-thermostat, and a waffle maker — without developing three separate machines from scratch.
Impact
Vintage targets genuine multi-tasking: cooking different foods that need different temperatures and conditions, all from one device. The fixed plate transfers heat efficiently with minimal loss, and the adjustable upper plate lets you cook at different heights without losing contact.
In production since 2021, still selling years later. Every function fits into one small, good-looking device built on a simple idea: less is more.
The real challenge wasn't designing a good grill — it was designing a heritage object that didn't feel like a costume. Every vintage cue, the visible screws, the rounded shell, the single-piece handle, had to read as intentional craft, not retro decoration applied to a modern shape.
At the same time, the platform had to stay disciplined enough that Grillo and the Waffle Maker could come from the same core without feeling like a cheap variant of Vintage. That balance — honoring fifty years of design history while building a scalable, modern platform underneath it — is where this project proved its point.
Three products, one platform, in production since 2021 and still on shelves. Aksu got three distinct market positions — and a renewed visual link to its own fifty-year history — for close to the cost of developing one.