LUNA — The Lunar Kitchen

Haier is a global leader in appliances — and almost invisible in the world it wants to enter next: the luxury, built-in kitchen. The brief, set with Haier’s MED division, was to help the brand expand from appliances to experiences, from function to emotion, from kitchen to life, and to imagine cross-category offerings that could sit naturally inside high-end kitchen portfolios.

This was a twelve-week strategy project on the IED Master. Across a thirteen-person team I worked on trend and strategy research — mapping the cultural and market forces that would decide whether Haier could be taken seriously in this space.

We prioritised depth over breadth: qualitative interviews and showroom visits across Italy, Spain, Germany and France, rather than broad quantitative validation. We spent time with the people who actually decide what goes into a luxury kitchen — kitchen makers, architects, specifiers and material suppliers — as well as Haier’s own stakeholders.

The world Haier wants to enter is not mass retail. It is a closed ecosystem with its own rules, gatekeepers and codes — a different championship. We called it The Club. And measured against The Club, Haier’s problems were specific: a thin premium portfolio, little presence in the kitchen-maker channel, and low brand awareness where it matters.

The strategy resolved into five moves — each a shift in how Haier should behave to be admitted, and to belong.

The Club speaks in emotion, not specs.

Fifth strategic pillar

Designers and kitchen makers lead with story, ritual and atmosphere — not technical sheets. For a brand fluent in performance language, this was the hardest and most important shift: to translate engineering into meaning.

The research pointed to a design brief: pair Haier’s technology leadership with European emotional design, begin with a hero category, and expand thoughtfully out of the kitchen. The concept that carried it was LUNA — a lunar kitchen built around hosting and atmosphere rather than specification.

LUNA treats the appliance as a piece of the room. A single continuous light seam signs each unit; the moon becomes a recurring motif — an object of gathering, staged like an installation.

The result is less a range of products than a posture: a way for Haier to enter a members-only world by speaking its language — emotion, ritual and atmosphere — while keeping the technology that is already its strength.