Cashing in on the home improvements boom is Swedish furniture giant Ikea, whose stores are springing up all across the country. They have built a reputation for delivering smart design at an affordable price.
As well as its furniture, Ikea is famed for its unique store layouts and queues, where you walk in at one end and stroll through a smorgasbord of the latest in home furnishing, ranging from the home assembly kits to the latest in smarthouse storage. Some families, in fact, tailor their weekends around a trek to Ikea.
Ever since I visited an Ikea store in Europe many years ago, I have been fascinated as to why this organisation is so successful. Its selling methods are unique, the products outstanding for the price and they have an impressive information architecture going on with everything they do.
It's all in the flow
If you haven't done it before, try walking into an Ikea store. The first thing you notice is that everything flows one way and is split into smarthouse sections. If you follow the crowd entering their stores you will find that the set purchase displays actually work. You can encounter bin after bin of toilet plungers, pizza cutters and CD holders. These seem to also be roughly laid out according to the rooms in a house, and reminded me more of a regular department store.
All items are clearly labelled with a unique identifier, a style and, strangely enough, the name of the designer. I couldn't fathom why this was important. Perhaps they like to recognise their designers? Super. Then, later on, I found myself searching for styles similar to one I'd been looking at earlier, and realised that this was just another possible way of organising their material.
Similar to how clothing department stores organise their stock, Ikea is one of those companies that has survived in the cutthroat world of home furnishing products, from space-saving cabinets and smart lighting to the smart home office furniture. So why have they survived and grown to be one of the world's most successful companies?
Keeping it honest
The quirky, privately held company was run for decades by Ingvar Kamprad, who built the business into an affordable and attractive self-assembly furniture store for the masses. His objective was to deliver smart furniture at an affordable price.
Notorious for cost-consciousness, Kamprad vetoed first-class flights and forced managers to find the cheapest hotels. The egalitarian tone still exists in practices such as "anti-bureaucratic weeks", when managers work in stores or warehouses.
Ikea likes to think of itself as a better corpo-rate citizen than most companies, and goes out of its way to deliver environmentally friendly products. However, this has not been achieved without confrontation.
A decade ago, the company was stunned by the first threat to its good name. The issue of child labour had just reached popular awareness in Europe in 1992 when Ikea was blindsided by a Swedish documentary. The film showed children chained to weaving looms in Pakistan, and cited Ikea as a customer.
