The Pepsi Man Is Coming to Save Samsung From Boring Design

Samsung has one Among the largest product line-ups of any tech brand, yet when it comes to design, it’s consistently seen as an “O-run.” While other companies have created distinctive and instantly recognizable design languages ​​like nothing else, Samsung has found itself lagging behind in terms of style. When you’ve got Apple as your biggest competitor, it’s not a great place to be.

That’s not to say there haven’t been improvements over the last decade, and occasional flashes of promise—most notably in collaborations with exotic designers, e.g. Borrowlek brotherwho developed Serif TV for the South Korean company. But that didn’t stop complaints of both boring and unoriginal designs internally And externallyAnd when it’s an inertia there is In the lead, leaving other companies to close the gap.

Being defined by performance over personality has hardly hurt Samsung’s bottom line—it recently regained its lead from Apple. Global smartphone market share and has been World leader in TV For almost two decades. But, in 2025, it seems that there is finally a clear desire from Samsung to bridge the gap between form and function, by giving the focus to design that the company has lacked for so long.

Back in April, Samsung hired its first chief design officer, Mauro Porcini. Porsini spent more than 20 years building award-winning design teams at 3M and PepsiCo, most recently successfully leading Global rebrand for PepsiThe company’s first in 14 years.

For a company as big as Samsung, this hire is late. Apple made the same position for Jony Ive a decade ago, around the same time it was reported that Samsung’s innovation was being stifled. Level of management. With these structural issues supposedly unpicked, Samsung now has work to do – something Porcini is keen to acknowledge.

late to the party

“We’re at a moment of change, where the way people interact with any kind of machine or electronic device is going to be radically different in the coming years,” Porcini tells me. “These machines will change the way people live, work and connect with each other – the way people meet their needs. For a company like Samsung, having design at the top, intertwined with how you define the future of the portfolio based on those needs – is more important than ever.”

The march of AI is certainly a helpful hook on which to tie this long-overdue move, but Yves Behar, its founder and chief designer Fuse project Who worked with Samsung Frame TVTells me it’s been years in the making, and some Samsung initially looked outwards to help set the wheels in motion.

“When we started working on the frame with Samsung [released in January 2017]The CEO at the time, HS Kim, came to us and said—look, we want to transform ourselves from a consumer technology company to an experience business.” “So we helped them define some principles around that and worked to bring that message to the business — what it means to think about experience versus technology,” Behar said. That’s exactly what we did with Frame TV.”