The wide-eyed Lufthansa executive took one look at me at the entrance to the airline’s Welcome Lounge. “Do you plan on wearing that?” he asked.

He was escorting me to Lufthansa’s corporate headquarters near the Frankfurt Airport to interview a number of the company’s senior executives, and I had prepared for the big day by showing up in an old T-shirt, ripped shorts, and flip-flops.

He tried to contain his horror as I offered an excuse: Upon arriving at the lounge, I had taken advantage of the pass he’d mailed me a week earlier that entitled me to a shower in the spa. In my haste, I’d packed a post-shower change of clothes – any old change of clothes – without thinking that my interviews would come right after that exhilarating shower. So there I was, looking more like a beach bum than a business reporter with an interesting story on my hands.

I’d come to Frankfurt having spent a year in the Middle East. And it’s in the Middle East, and not Europe, where this story begins. The Gulf boasts some remarkable airlines. Their strategies for success, which revolve around lavishly decorated cabins, gold-plated washroom fixtures, and shockingly low passenger-to-stewardess ratios, are now mimicked by every ambitious airline the world over.

Except by the Lufthansa Group. With 76 million passengers across a number of subsidiaries and a market cap of $5.7 billion, Lufthansa is Europe’s largest airline. I came to Frankfurt to see how the company, voted best airline in the world in the Business Travel Awards for 2010, is spearheading a successful expansion into the Middle East by doing things the way other big carriers – particularly those in the Gulf – are not.

Whereas being contrarian doesn’t always work (like wearing ripped shorts and T-shirt to interview airline executives), there are times it works all too well. In the business world, the difference between success and failure is knowing exactly when to go against the grain.

Take something like the look and feel of a first-class cabin, for instance. The conclusion that a European competitor of any of the big Gulf carriers would make is that first-class cabin layouts are all about pods. These are personalized cabins that allow each person with a first-class ticket to nestle snuggly in a lavishly appointed space set apart from the rest of the passengers.

Yet Lufthansa, which is beginning to roll out its new first-class redesign this summer, is going in the opposite direction. “We’ve found that passengers prefer open space, which is why we’ve designed our cabins to have a wide open, airy feel to them,” the head of Lufthansa’s board service product competence center, Dr. Ingo Bülow, says. “A first-class passenger can put up a privacy screen when he wants to sleep, but our research tells us he prefers not to feel isolated from the rest of the plane when he’s awake.”

Another example of interior design is the much heralded shower facilities on board the new Airbus A380 double-decker, “superjumbo” jet, of which Lufthansa took its first delivery in the spring. A carrier can configure an A380 to have a shower available to first-class passengers. No matter how over-the-top an in-flight shower seemed to be for a first-class passenger, Lufthansa’s executives passed on the option based on feedback gained from customer workshops.

First, they suspected that every passenger would want to take his five-minute shower near the end of each flight. Who wants to board a plane and begin with a shower? Or be woken up midway through the flight to take the shower? So there would be a logjam of passengers vying for end-of-flight time slots.

Then there was the fact that Lufthansa’s redesign of its first- and business-class cabins is in line with a similar effort to revamp its network of airport lounges. This “seamless travel” concept banks on the idea that you can walk into any Lufthansa, Swiss, or Austrian lounge and experience the same level of service and a subtle, elegant décor in shades of brown and beige.

“Lufthansa’s shower in the Welcome Lounge is a real first-class product as opposed to a shower on board a competitor’s airplane,” Bülow says. “The shower on board an airplane is aiming at something you will never attain. You’ll never make all your passengers happy with a quick five-minute shower at an unwanted time during the flight. It’s a youth hostel scene that, frankly, we don’t want for our first-class passengers.”

Part of Lufthansa’s strategy comes from practical concerns: Because it’s a publicly traded company, it doesn’t have the endless stream of resources that a state-owned and subsidized carrier enjoys. Not to mention the fact that the past year has been one of the most difficult in the history of the airline industry. An extreme winter, European labor strikes, and a slump in tourism were already taking their toll when, in the spring, volcanic ash from Iceland grounded entire airline fleets for weeks.

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