Understanding the market differently
A broader perspective on markets, products, design, culture and global business.
How Homa Europe’s Culture & Growth Training Programme helps build an international industrial culture in which understanding the market is part of knowing how to manufacture.
Homa Europe
After ten days in Milan, a colleague can return to the same role and see the same refrigerator differently. A feature that once made sense mainly as a specification may take on new meaning when seen on a retailer’s floor or in the kitchen of someone deciding how to keep food fresh. That change in perspective is what the Homa Europe Culture & Growth Training Programme is designed to encourage.
The programme was inspired by Homa CEO Michael Yao and designed and led by Federico Rebaudo, General Manager of Homa Europe. At Homa Studio in Milan, colleagues from Homa’s International Business Centres consider what it takes to translate the needs of different markets into decisions an industrial team can act on.
Through this programme, Homa Europe is helping to build an international industrial culture in which understanding the market becomes an integral part of knowing how to manufacture. At Homa, that means asking what a product needs to do for the customer’s brand and for the people who will use it, then bringing that understanding into the work of making it.
As an original equipment manufacturer, Homa develops and manufactures refrigeration appliances for other companies. Its customers bring their own brand identities and serve markets with distinct expectations. Knowing how a cabinet or cooling system can be made is one part of the job. Knowing what a particular design choice will mean for the customer gives the industrial team a better question to solve.
In FUSION, Denise Lee Yohn argues that a company’s external brand and its internal culture should grow from the same purpose. In the book excerpt published by Porchlight, she explains that in many business relationships, “culture is on display to customers much more clearly through people’s attitudes and behaviors.”
For Homa, that idea becomes concrete when a customer brings a brief to the team. The questions we ask about that brief reveal what we pay attention to. If a retailer wants a refrigerator to fit a particular kitchen layout, understanding how customers use that space can inform the choices we discuss with engineering. Homa grounds this work in Care, Design and Food Preservation. Care enters an industrial decision when attention to how people live shapes the way we design an appliance that preserves their food.
Milan lets participants observe what happens between the factory and the home. In a showroom, they can see how a retailer presents competing appliances and which differences are easy for a shopper to understand. At Triennale Milano’s Museo del Design Italiano, they can trace how everyday objects changed as the lives of the people using them changed.
These observations give colleagues something specific to discuss back at Homa Studio. What might a product team learn from a showroom where appliances are presented as part of a kitchen? How would that insight change the brief for a particular brand? Those questions connect the experience of a market with the practical decisions involved in serving it.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 identifies skills gaps as a leading barrier to business transformation among surveyed employers. The question of how companies create time and opportunity for learning is equally important. Gallup’s research on employee development examines obstacles employees face when trying to take part in development, including competing work demands.
McKinsey’s research on skills in European organisations describes the value of making skills a strategic priority and giving people opportunities to use what they learn. Yohn’s Harvard Business Review article on company culture makes a related point about shared responsibility. Culture takes shape through the decisions people make in their own roles.
In Milan, a colleague has time to follow a question from the showroom back to a customer conversation. The work continues when that colleague returns and has to interpret a new brief, explain a design decision or bring a local observation into a discussion with the factory. These are occasions to put learning to work.
Personal reflections from Homa colleagues on what they learned during the Culture & Growth Training Programme.
A broader perspective on markets, products, design, culture and global business.
Understanding customers also means understanding their markets.
It is about how people use it, how it fits into their lives, and how it makes them feel.
What resonated with me the most was how you helped me rethink the goal of our work and redefine what “success” truly means.
A valuable shift in how engineers like myself can better connect design thinking with technical execution.
These are exactly the skills that transform an OEM supplier into a true global partner.
This blend of professional development and genuine care has reshaped my approach to leadership.
This journey is about building credibility and reliability step by step, with intention and consistency.
While working together at Studio Volpi, Federico Gallina and Patrizio Cionfoli (now SVP & Chief Design Officer at Havells) led a design workshop for Homa’s visiting team. In her account of the training, Rita Xiao credits Guido Bedont of Logic Comunication with explaining how Homa Europe’s digital presence connects the company with customers.
Design Group Italia and Logic Comunication also described their involvement in public responses to Homa Europe’s account of the programme. Umberto Palermo Design is among the partners Homa credits with supporting the programme.
A participant’s reflection tells us what stood out to that person. The longer term ambition is visible in the work itself. It might be a better question about how a customer’s brand is positioned, asked early enough to shape a brief. It might be an observation about how people shop or store food, shared with the engineers who can turn it into a design decision.
Homa has written about making the thinking behind manufacturing visible. The programme brings that thinking into the development of the people who represent the company across markets. Each time something learned in Milan informs a decision about a product or a customer, it becomes part of how Homa works.
Copyright HOMA 2026- Issued By Homa Marketing dept. on November 2026
For further Information and Press Contacts: info@homaeurope.eu
