Every April, Milan reasserts itself as the design world’s centre of gravity. For one week, the city becomes a single, bustling showroom, and Salone del Mobile, at the heart of it, is where the industry’s most consequential business is not only displayed but conducted. This year, NKBA’s Global Connect team ensured they were part of that conversation.
Salone has been running since 1961, evolving into one of the design calendar’s essential fixtures: a whole-home furnishing event with entire halls given over to kitchen and bath alone. With each edition, it has grown more international, a shift that matters acutely to an association like NKBA, for whom Salone offers something rarer than exhibition space. It is a chance to remain fluent in the conversations happening abroad, and to carry that fluency back to a North American market that increasingly expects it.
Steven Campeau, Senior Manager of Global & Government Relations at NKBA | KBIS, led the Global Connect delegation on the ground, with a clear remit: reconnect with the brands already inside the programme, and identify those who ought to be.
Among current members, he met with Quooker of the Netherlands, Infinity of Italy, and Häcker of Germany, three companies whose differing markets and specialities illustrate precisely what Global Connect was conceived to do. Each represents a distinct route toward the same destination: a considered, well-supported entry into North America’s kitchen and bath industry.
“Meeting with current Global Connect members at Salone was an amazing opportunity to dive deeper into their brand stories and journeys,” Campeau reflected, “and to better understand how this ties into their entry and expansion into the North American market.” The value he describes is not incidental. It is structural: marketing support, advisor relationships, and access to NKBA’s chapter network, a foothold, deliberately built, into an industry worth $228 billion.
The scope of the visit extended well beyond its existing membership. Over the course of the week, the Global Connect team met with more than twenty prospective companies, their work spanning outdoor kitchens, decorative hardware, cabinetry, faucets, and vanities. Between them, these prospects represented six countries, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Sweden, and Romania, a geography that speaks to how far the appetite for the North American market now reaches.
The week closed, fittingly, at Palazzo Litta, where NKBA sponsored North America Night. This year’s theme, En Masse, “all together,” or “as a whole”, was chosen in tribute to collective momentum: the notion that creative communities, however scattered across disciplines and borders, remain bound by shared experience. Within the palazzo’s historic walls, that idea felt less like a theme than a fact.
What the week in Milan makes plain is that Global Connect operates as more than a membership programme. It is infrastructure, the quiet mechanism by which a faucet manufacturer in Sweden, or a hardware house in Romania, eventually finds its way onto a North American specification sheet. Which of this year’s names resurface by KBIS 2027 will be worth watching closely.
The programme exists to connect and grow the kitchen and bath industry across borders, through an international membership model. For companies seeking entry into North America, it offers something a trade show badge alone cannot: market intelligence, guidance on brand positioning, and genuine introductions to the audiences that matter. Paired with NKBA’s marketing expertise and its broader member network, the result is visibility, relationship, and demand, the groundwork for lasting success within a market worth $228 billion.
The Luxe Resident 