The Pepsi man is coming to save Samsung from boring design

Samsung has one One of the largest product ranges of any technology brand, but when it comes to design, it’s always seen as ‘too turned on’. While other companies have crafted distinctive and instantly recognizable design languages, like Nothing, Samsung has found itself lagging behind in the design bets. When Apple is one of your biggest competitors, it’s not a great situation to be in.

That’s not to say there haven’t been improvements in the past decade, and occasional flashes of promise — most notably in its collaborations with outside designers, like the Bouroullec brothers, who designed the South Korean company’s Serif TV. But that hasn’t stopped complaints about boring and unoriginal design, both internally and externally, and stagnation when it’s done. He has led, leaving other companies to fill the gap.

Defining performance over personality has done Samsung no harm, as it recently regained its lead from Apple in global smartphone market share and has been the global leader in TVs for nearly two decades. But, in 2025, there finally seems to be a clear desire from Samsung to bridge the gap between form and function, by giving design the focus that it has lacked for too long at the company.

Last April, Samsung appointed Mauro Borsini, its first-ever chief design officer. Borsini spent more than 20 years building award-winning design teams at 3M and PepsiCo, most recently leading a successful global branding for Pepsi—the company’s first in 14 years.

For a company as large as Samsung, this appointment seems overdue. Apple created the same position for Jony Ive a decade ago, around the same time that innovation at Samsung was reportedly being stifled under layers of management. Assuming these structural issues remain unresolved, Samsung now has a lot of work to do, something Borsini is keen to acknowledge.

Late to the party

“We are in a moment of change, where the way people interact with any type of machine or electronic device will be radically different in the coming years,” Borsini told me. “These machines will change the way people live, work and communicate with each other – the way people meet their needs. For a company like Samsung, which has design at the top, and is involved in the way it defines the future of the portfolio based on those needs – it is more important than ever.”

The march of AI is, of course, a useful hook to tie this long-awaited move, but Yves Béhar, founder and lead designer at Fuseproject who worked with Samsung on The Frame TV, told me this has been years in the making, and is something Samsung initially looked at externally to help set the wheels in motion.

“When we started working with Samsung on The Frame [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 company,” Behar says. “So we helped them put some principles around that, and worked to get that message into the business – about what it means to think about experience versus technology. And that’s exactly what we did with The Frame TV.