The Dustbuster, the most successful product in Black & Decker history, was introduced in January, 1979. It was designed by Carroll Gantz, FIDSA, when he was Manager of the B&D US Consumer Power Tool Division’s Industrial Design Department. The Dustbuster created a new mass-market category of cordless, rechargeable hand-held vacuum cleaners, set the visual type-form for the new category and created a new household product business for B&D, enabling them to purchase General Electric’s entire Bridgeport, CT Housewares business in 1984. The two organizations merged in Shelton, CT and Gantz became Director of Design. Over a million Dustbusters were sold in its first year, four times that of the traditional hand-held vac market. Competitors soon flooded the market with dozens of imitations, a number of which were successfully litigated against by B&D because of a design patent covering its unique appearance and configuration. By 1985, the hand-held market was 6 to 7 million units annually, 90% of which was cordless, and 85% of that was B&D. By 1987, B&D’s annual sales were $1.791 billion, five times what they had been in 1972. The Dustbuster became an icon of popular culture. When the Smithsonian Institute acquired an original model in 1995, 100 millon had been sold. By 2004, 25 years after launch, total sales of it or its B&D descendants (there have been five or six redesigns) may be as high as 150 million, half again as many as the total number of VW Beetles sold in 60 years. In 1998, Windemere Durable Holdings acquired the B&D Household Product Business, and established Applica Consumer Products, Inc. It is the exclusive licensee for B&D Household products in North, South, and Central America. But B&D retained one important household product for itself—the Dustbuster, which continues to lead the hand-held vac category.

In 1927, General Electric introduced this "Monitor Top" refrigerator, so-named by the public because of the resemblance of the exposed compressor on top of its cabinet to the cylindrical turret of the Civil War gunship, the Monitor. The product, priced at $525, was designed by Chief Engineer Christian Steenstrup (1873-1955). It had a single door, and was the first all-steel refrigerator cabinet, earlier versions having been of wood to imitate furniture cabinetry. It quickly became one of GE's most successful products and made GE the industry leader, in spite of the fact that it was perched on the top of rather traditional looking "furniture" legs. Household refrigerators had been on the market for some time. GE was the first, marketing in 1911 a wooden model invented in France by a French monk, Abbé Marcel Audiffren. Called the Audiffren, it sold for $1000, twice the cost of a car, and was produced in France. The first successful domestic refrigerator to enter full scale production in the US was the Kelvinator, in 1918. Made of wood, it looked pretty much like a small bedroom night stand, with a single door. Frigidaire, purchased by General Motors in 1919, introduced its first home refrigerator in 1921, when there were only about 5000 refrigerators in the US. Also in wood, it was larger, about the size of a bedroom armoire, or wardrobe, with three doors. By 1923, there were 56 companies making refrigerators, using sulfur dioxide, methyl chloride, or ammonia gases, all of which were dangerously toxic. Two years after the "Monitor-Top", in 1929, the Kelvinator Four refrigerator debuted with no visible "legs". Its cabinet and compressor were cleanly encased in a simple white metal box design reaching the floor. It set the design typeform for home refrigerators for the rest of the century. Freon was discovered in 1930 by Delco chemist Thomas Midgely. Non-toxic, Freon was adopted by all manufacturers, and refrigerators became safe for use in the home.

This was the first consumer pop-up toaster, called the Toastmaster. It was introduced in 1926 by Waters-Genter Company, formed in 1921 to produce the invention patented by Charles Strite in 1919. The first Model 1-A-1 was designed by factory superintendent Murray Ireland. Since it automatically turned off the toaster when toast was done, and toasted both sided of the bread simultaneously, it revolutionized the time-consuming chores of watching the toast, and turning it when one side was done. The company was acquired later in the year by McGraw Electric Company, later to be known a McGraw-Edison, and later still as Toastmaster (see below). General Electric introduced its first widely-distributed electric toaster in 1908 to an already full line of consumer heating and cooking devices being marketed. The two-slice model D-12, with a porcelain base, remained in production until 1913. Toasters were first tested by Underwriter's Laboratories in 1909 and included models by Westinghouse and General Electric. At that time, toasters were of completely open construction, with no cover or shell, and were viewed as fire hazards. Later toasters became much safer with manually-operated drop-down side doors, which not only kept hands away from the red-hot heating elements, but nicely flipped over the bread to expose the opposite side to the heat, when doors were opened. Still, they took careful watching to avoid burnt toast. In 1939, the Toastmaster model 1B9, designed by Jean Otis Reinecke and his staff at Barnes & Reinecke, was introduced by McGraw Electric Company. It was the first to exploit the curvature of chrome-plated shells on toasters, increased sales dramatically, was widely imitated, and served as the typeform for toasters well into the 1960s. One of Reinecke's designers, Fred Priess, designed the linear "three loop" decoration which became the company's symbol. The 1947 IB14 model sold seven million units by 1961.