Warren MacKenzie's simple, wheel-thrown functional pottery is heavily influenced by the aesthetic of Shoji Hamada and Korean ceramics. He is credited with bringing the Japanese Mingei style of pottery to Minnesota, fondly referred to as the "Mingei-sota style.

The first major influence on the MacKenzies was the work of the British potter Bernard Leach and his acclaimed 1940 book, A Potter’s Book, which they first discovered as students in Chicago. They were impressed with Leach’s philosophy, which embraced Eastern and Western practices and celebrated the simple Mingei functional pot. After moving to Saint Paul, and following much correspondence, they convinced Leach to take them on as apprentices at his renowned pottery in St. Ives, Cornwall, England. Taking a leave of absence from the school in 1949, they crossed the Atlantic Ocean by ship and did not return to Saint Paul until 1952.

Fortuitously, Warren and Alix ended up living in Leach’s home where they were surrounded by an array of pots from China, Japan, and elsewhere. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Japan, Leach had, in his youth, befriended the young Japanese potter Shoji Hamada, who helped him set up his St. Ives pottery in 1920. Apprenticing at this pottery 30 years later, the MacKenzies met Hamada, by then a master Mingei potter, and the aesthetician Soetsu Yanagi, who had coined the term Mingei (folk art) in 1926 to refer to common, often anonymously made, craft objects. Yanagi celebrated Mingei in his book The Unknown Craftsman and went on to become the founder and first director of the Mingeikan Folk Crafts Museum in Tokyo, which opened in 1936. In July 1952, Hamada and Yanagi were in England to participate in the International Conference of Potters and Weavers, held at Dartington Hall, for which Leach was a co-organizer.  Daily contact with Hamada and Yanagi drew the MacKenzies even more deeply into the Mingei philosophy: showing them that it was a way of life, not just a way of making pots, and set their future course.

With the Mingei philosophy, most of Warren's bowls, platters, vases, jars, cups, and teapots are functional, comfortable, and keep with simple decorative elements.

Today, 70 years later, the MacKenzies’ team practice is still regarded as the source of Minnesota’s thriving 21st century ceramic community.