 What's your favorite mushroom? Porcini. Mauro Porcini, chief design officer of PepsiCo. Are you ready to answer some questions? Usually I would say I am. But with you and your questions, I don't know. We'll see. Okay. Is it Morrow or Mauro? Do you correct people or just let it roll? I let it roll. What do you like? Either way, because I butcher the names of others all day. So, you know, I expect this from others with me. Okay. Of all the brands you work on at PepsiCo, why do you want to talk about soda stream professional? It's one of the brands of the future. It talks about sustainability, it talks about health and wellness, it talks about customization, all enabled by technology. I love it. Who comes up with the idea for Soda Stream Pro in the organization? Well, I don't know exactly the person, but it was literally a conversation about where we want to go in the future. We had this platform before we acquired Soda Stream, and we realized that Soda Stream was a beautiful brand to connect everything is about what we call beyond the bottle. You know, a future where plastic bottles are used in a different way or, you know, in the case of Soda Stream, they're reused. In advertising, it's stereotypical to have a strategist be British and speaking the Queen's English. How has being Italian helped you in your career? Because I don't work in advertising, and my brand is design, it helps me a lot, actually. Do you enjoy product design or graphic design more? The mix of both of them. I don't think each one can live by itself. They need to live together, especially in this society we live in today. If you had $1 to spend, where would you spend it? On talents. We all know Soda Stream Home, now they're a Soda Stream professional. What is the brand challenge? It's a brand opportunity, as I see it, because once again we had a tech platform, we had a product, and we wanted to identify a brand that was already familiar with people and connect that experience from home to on the go, wherever you are, in a seamless way. Coincidentally, everything was going into more office amenities, everything office office, then COVID hits, now we're back to plastic bottles, don't touch me, nothing communal. Has this changed any of the strategy for Soda Stream professional? There was a pause because the offices were closed, but now they were going back. We want to have that kind of touchless experience. There is a new attention to sustainability, to health and wellness. So it was a pause to then amplify everything. When I think of PepsiCo, I think of cans, bottles, all the physical elements to it. Is there a world, since I'm not a futurist, where that is not those brands, or they're not existing in that fashion? I think the future will be a future of reuse and recycle. So there will be a future for PepsiCo, where we'll have vessels that we reuse continuously. But there will be always space anyway for something that you can find on the go, wherever you are, and the convenience of something like this. Okay, we are at the flow code flow question. So our sponsor Flow Code is going to put on screen a big beautiful customized flow code just for you and Soda Stream Professional. You could make it do anything you want, as long as you help the consumers connect with you in the brand. What would you love it to do? Probably the Soda Stream Professional app essentially gives you the possibility to be recognized by the machine through your app or through the bottle that you carry with you. And you can track the bottle that you use and you are not wasting in the environment. The amount of water you are putting in your body daily. So something very useful for you. Do brands matter as much in the office when the choices are made by an HR department and procurement rather than a customer? You know, at the end of the day, any HR leader or procurement leader is a human being before being a professional. And so if you create a brand that you create trust and has a positive purposeful promise, also these people will be engaged and attracted by this brand. And so in their business decisions, they will be influenced by the nature of the brand. So I do think that is important. Your personal style is very loud and fun and European. Do you bring that to the office or does it get a pinched more muted and corporate? I bring it to the office but I do believe also that you need to tune your style, your body language, essentially what we call the visual codes on the base of your target audience, the context and the kind of message you want to deliver. Do you literally roll up to the office every day like in a fashion way? Or do you bring it down a little bit more black and just... No, no, no. I go to the office in this way because they expect me as a designer to be disruptive and unexpected and different. The ability as a crazy designer to talk business is very important to rebalance the discomfort that something like this creates in the boardroom. How long does it take you to get ready in the morning? At this point it became very intuitive but I made my mistakes. I wore too loud in certain situations and not loud enough in others. So then after doing it for more than 30 years in a professional environment, I learned how to do it. But I will do mistakes again in the future, I'm sure. You used to use the hashtag Mauro Shoes. Can you bring it back? I will. I miss it, too. If you could only have one pair of shoes, what would it be? I'm gonna say Golden Goose because my fiancé works there. I remember seeing an MTV Cribs episode where someone had a urinal in their home bathroom and I thought, that was quite a status symbol. Can you see the same thing happening with a SodaStream professional? We designed SodaStream professional thinking sooner or later something like this will happen in the home. So if somebody decided to take the machine today and bring it home today, I would be very happy. I adore my Nespresso. Was that an inspiration? Yes, I think Nespresso is an inspiration for any designer in the planet. What do you love about America? What do you hate about America? How united America used to be and I hope it's gonna be again. What I don't like too much is when we're not united anymore because it is the strength that everybody admire in this country and we should really preserve it. Who do you professionally compare yourself to? I'm not a designer, I'm not a business person anymore. I am there floating in the middle so it's difficult for me to find somebody that is doing this between the two worlds. What's your favorite mushroom? Porcini. If you could design the perfect city, what would it be? A city where nature is totally merged together with anything is artificial. If you had to be remembered for one thing in PepsiCo, what would you want it to be? Being the person that helped the company become more sustainable and more focused on Alton wellness. Mauro Porcini, Chief Design Officer of PepsiCo, thank you so much for coming on and answering some questions. Thank you for having me. I'm Ian Wishingrad and I'll see you next time on I'm With the Brand.