The Pepsi Man Is Coming to Save Samsung From Boring Design

Samsung has one of the most important product line ups of any tech model, but in terms of design, it’s constantly seen as an “also-ran.” Whereas different corporations have solid distinctive and immediately recognizable design languages, corresponding to Nothing, Samsung has discovered itself behind within the model stakes. While you’ve acquired Apple as one in every of your greatest opponents, that’s not an awesome place to be in.

That’s to not say there haven’t been enhancements within the final decade, and the occasional flashes of promise—most notable in its collaborations with exterior designers, just like the Bouroullec brothers, who common the Serif TV for the South Korean firm. However that hasn’t stopped complaints of boring and unoriginal design, each internally and externally, and an inertia when it has led, leaving different corporations to shut the hole.

Being outlined by efficiency over persona has hardly carried out Samsung’s backside line any hurt—it lately regained its lead from Apple in international smartphone market share and has been the international chief in TVs for nearly 20 years. However, in 2025, it seems to be there’s lastly a transparent need from Samsung to bridge the hole between kind and performance, by giving design the main target it’s been missing for a lot too lengthy on the firm.

Again in April, Samsung employed Mauro Porcini, its first ever chief design officer. Porcini has spent greater than 20 years constructing award-winning design groups at 3M and PepsiCo, most lately main a profitable international rebrand for Pepsi—the corporate’s first in 14 years.

For a corporation as massive as Samsung, this rent feels late. Apple created the identical place for Jony Ive a decade in the past, across the identical time it was reported that innovation at Samsung was being stifled beneath layers of administration. With these structural points supposedly unpicked, Samsung now has work to do—one thing Porcini is eager to acknowledge.

Late to the Celebration

“We’re in a second of change, the place the way in which folks work together with any type of machine or digital system goes to be radically totally different within the coming years,” Porcini tells me. “These machines will change the way in which folks dwell, work, and join with one another—the way in which folks fulfil their wants. For a corporation like Samsung, having design on the prime, concerned in the way in which you outline the way forward for the portfolio primarily based on these wants—it’s extra essential than ever.”

The march of AI is, after all, a useful hook upon which to tie this lengthy overdue transfer, however Yves Béhar, the founder and principal designer at Fuseproject who labored with Samsung on The Body TV, tells me this has been years within the making, and one thing Samsung had initially seemed externally to assist put the wheels in movement.

“After we began working with Samsung on The Body [released in January 2017], the CEO on the time, HS Kim, got here to us and stated—look, we wish to remodel ourselves from a shopper know-how firm, into an expertise enterprise,” says Béhar. “So we helped them set some rules round that, and labored on getting that message out into the enterprise—of what it means to consider expertise versus tech. That is precisely what we did with The Body TV.”