Cosentino Cities: global showrooms driving innovation and inspiration from within

Cristina Mariaca, Global Director of Retail + Business Innovation shares how Cosentino City showrooms are revolutionizing how we connect with clients.

Cosentino lives and breathes innovation, propelled by each one of our 5,000+ employees. The Retail and Business Innovation Unit, led by Global Director Cristina Mariaca embodies Cosentino’s innovative spirit.  With 20 years of experience, Cristina brings a breadth of knowledge and expertise which coupled with Cosentino’s openness and adaptability to new ideas make a winning combination. 

Read on to discover what Cosentino has in store...

Cristina, please tell us about your role as Global Director of Retail and Business Innovation.

Innovation is deeply embedded in the Cosentino DNA, and all 5,000+ of us who are part of this company are driving innovation. I joined the team in 2021 to create the Retail & Business Innovation Department (RBI), an experimental business unit set up to ensure the successful execution of downstream innovation programs. We’re radically changing the way that Cosentino engages with the architecture and design ecosystem, focusing on three of our top strategic priorities: the value proposition of our global showrooms known as Cosentino Cities, adoption of customer programs such as C·Top Design, and growth of our newer applications including the Cosentino’s premium bath collection.

I bring to Cosentino almost 20 years of experience in innovation execution across multiple industries, but I had never had the opportunity to work with an organization that absorbs and adopts new ideas with such open enthusiasm. At RBI, we partner transversally with every business unit in the company, and in the 16 months since our launch we’ve piloted new showroom phygital experiences with our Business Technology and Marketing teams, partnered closely with the Digital Business Unit to roll out C·Top Design across three continents, and worked with sales teams to double the revenue attributed to our Cosentino City showrooms, among many other exciting achievements.

In everything we do at RBI, we follow an execution management methodology that is inspired by agile and design thinking, lots of ‘do-what-it-takes attitude’, and continuously looking for improvement opportunities to accelerate growth.

Can you tell us a bit about Cosentino’s global showrooms - Cosentino Cities - and what they reprernt for the interior design community?

The Cosentino City is our free-standing showroom concept, and they’re located in city centers in the key design capitals around the globe - from Los Angeles to Sydney. We currently operate 21 Cosentino Cities, and our latest openings include: Atlanta, Chicago, Paris, and Stockholm; with Tokyo opening in July. Additionally, we operate over 50 showrooms within our Cosentino Center warehouses and, all in all, our global showrooms serve as hubs for our professional partners and their homeowner clients who are working on design & architecture projects.  

We’re constantly evolving the showroom experience, and the latest showroom model, which we call the “2.0 City Model” is a highly immersive and experiential space that facilitates materials specification, project visualization, and industry networking. Designers are welcome to use the City as their work space, ideation tool, learning hub, and a source of referral for professional partners. Each City team organizes at least two events weekly, with a wide range of topics ranging from architecture in the metaverse, sustainable design, and residential façade mounting systems. The City is a practical space that aims to provide value to our clients, but the most special feature is the global community that we’ve created through our City network. When we tell a designer in Los Angeles that we can organize a meet-and-greet with other designers – champagne sips included – during their next visit to Paris, Tokyo, or Milan, they’re delighted. And we cherish those opportunities to connect our professional partners.  

What does the revamped 2.0 City model represent for Cosentino? Why did the company introduce this new model?

We’ve been testing and evolving the City showroom model for about ten years. Whereas the original Cosentino City was exclusively a showroom that showcased Dekton and Silestone’s latest collections, the new 2.0 model is a bold leap forward in purpose and productivity. The City is now multi-material, multi-application, and serves as a tool for full-project ideation. The Atelier is the centerpiece of the new 2.0 City experience and serves as a walk-in mood board. When Designers walk into our Atelier and are immersed in samples of all our colors in Silestone, Dekton, Sensa, as well as samples of fabrics, woods, and metal fittings - their imagination immediately sparks. My favorite City immersion story is an interior designer who, after more than an hour at the Atelier, asked if she could return the next day and bring paints and sketching supplies. This is exactly the purpose of the new model: a user experience that facilitates full-project inspiration and visualization.  

Our Design team adapts each City to its location and aims to showcase multiple applications, like using Dekton Slim (4mm) to clad the show kitchen cabinets or installing bespoke vanities in the bathrooms to highlight our integrated washbasin solutions. Since the color, material, and application combinations are nearly endless, we leverage lots of purposeful digital tools, including our popular Digital Slab that facilitates visualization of our materials in their full large format.

How is C.Top Design revolutionizing the way Cosentino connects with designers?

The key to Cosentino’s earlier success was customer-centricity and empathy in building a global service network for our fabricator partners. Then the Company followed by establishing a similarly service-oriented relationship with K&B stores. Later came builders, developers, and big-box retailers. For several years, Patty Dominguez, VP of A+D Sales for Cosentino North America, had been encouraging the company to establish a global program that focused on value generation for the Interior Design community. In May 2021, we began to roll out the C·Top Design program globally, offering designers a dedicated sales professional, full use of our Cosentino City network, and design-oriented product collections, the multi-service C·Top online platform, and co-marketing opportunities, among other benefits. Designers love the direct relationship and personalized attention, and the opportunity to learn first-hand about how to design with our materials.     

What are you most excited about in the coming years?

Our Deputy Chairman, Pilar Cosentino, calls the next few years The New Era of Design for Cosentino. While the company has been in constant motion and development since its very beginning, right now we’re beginning a new stage of growth that builds on our capacity to innovate. We are the indisputable global leader in kitchen countertops, but the new Silestone with HybriQ+ Technology and our carbon neutral Dekton product are the best surfaces for any design project, including outdoor spaces, pool decks, façades, large-format flooring and wall cladding, and, of course, bathroom spaces.

As we expand the C·Top Design program, I’m excited about the creativity that Designers will bring in applying our materials throughout their projects. I’m excited to build more direct channels to listen to their input, because they’ll help us evolve our product collections, our services, and our way of work.