Car Design Review X: Florian Seidl, Lavazza

There was an understanding at Lavazza that if it wanted to have a certain family feeling between products, to add value over time to the brand, it had to do things a certain way. Previously the head of project would call three-to-five external design agencies and brief them. There would be a pitch, and they would probably create a good product, but there would be no continuity. So that’s why Lavazza thought it should set up a design operation. We still work with an external company and an alias modeller of five years standing plus three others. But only two are in-house.

What we are doing now on a much smaller scale is what I learned through car design. We try to design our products with the same level of attention to detail and surface quality and to a certain extent I think that distinguishes our products at this moment in time. We wanted something that was thoroughly Italian at heart, but initially it wasn’t clear what that meant – it could be anything from the Memphis Group to Fiat or Lancia or whatever. For us, the starting point is very dolce vita, almost a little bit retro, colourful and friendly, but maybe with a slightly more modern outlook.

What’s the difference between car design and what I do now at Lavazza? Loads. In the car industry, design is a much more consolidated reality. People don’t question its existence. It’s the starting point of every new product, but also means the design centre can become a segregated ivory tower. Where I worked before in Fiat’s Centro Stile, your everyday contact would mainly be other designers, maybe your chief designer or modellers and every once in awhile someone from marketing or product would come in and give a recommendation or request something. But other than that, car design is very isolated.

When I moved to Lavazza, it was a full-contact sport with all the other departments, from ‘day one’. I had to deal with marketing, engineering, legal, manufacturing – and we had to fly to China to make the products. Half of our products are made in China and half in Eastern Europe currently.

Lavazza is now an industrial group with several brands, including Carte Noir, a French coffee brand and the Mars chocolate drinks division, so we design the vending machines for those and work on other non-Lavazza-branded products too. There was a rebrand when I joined and Lavazza added ‘Torino, Italy’ and ‘1895’ – the year of its founding – on its products. I’m not a big fan of in-your-face branding. A brand like Lavazza doesn’t need the tricolore flag on its products.

Although I’m now an outsider looking in at the car design industry, I still think it’s such a great profession. The complexity of the product requires such a vast set of skills coming together to develop a product that can reach the market in a short period of time. I still think it’s at the top of the pyramid and I’m trying to emulate what I learned there in my small area. But car design is also incredibly weird. It is very incestuous, superficial and self-referential. I’ve learned that design is a very important part of the development process, but it is only a part of it. You have a very limited view of what is happening on a strategic level as a young car designer – just whether your design gets chosen or not.

In terms of brands and cars, I thought the 2022 Dacia Manifesto concept was interesting. I’m not quite sure how much it can translate into an actual product, but there are a lot of things on it I liked and it was a stand-out concept for me from the last few years.

Beyond cars, Apple is still an obvious one, but I think even it may have peaked, especially with Jonny Ive having left. Bang & Olufsen is still great, obviously it’s not your everyday brand. Sony is doing great, on and off, and Philips as well in different areas. It’s tricky nowadays as our perceptions are dominated by big brands like Apple. It’s hard to make room for others.

Exterior car design is more about sculpture and shape, while interior design is more about creating a living space and interaction. Obviously you can’t sit in a coffee machine, but the way I approach design now is a scaled-down version of exterior car design. It doesn’t have wheels, the user interaction is completely different so it’s a strange mix of buttons and touch, but the borders are fluid. If you have a capsule that has to be taken out we also make sure that inside the coffee machine is ‘controlled’ in its design. I’m a nightmare for my engineering colleagues. They used to tell me, ‘that doesn’t really matter, as it’s underneath the machine or at the back, so no-one’s going to see it’. But I was very anal, and very ‘car design-y’ in the way I would make sure things looked good everywhere.

Moving away from the dream of being a car designer was very risky and challenging, but it was also very gratifying and helped me to grow as a designer. I wouldn’t claim to know all of it now, but I have a better understanding of the complexity of new product development.