©Ikea
The company is experimenting with new ways to shop–and rewriting its business model in the process.
Ikea is the biggest furniture retailer in the world–a title that the company has managed to hold on to, amazingly, without a serious digital presence. In the age of free Amazon same-day delivery, Ikea still does a vast majority of its sales through its physical stores.
Its commitment to digital is quickly increasing, though. People visited Ikea stores 936 million times last year, but they visited Ikea online 2.3 billion times. Meanwhile, the company debuted new ways to shop using AR and VR, partnered with the visual AI startup GrokStyle, and acquired the gig economy company TaskRabbit. In short, Ikea is acting more like a tech company than a furniture maker. And within the next few years, the way you think about shopping at Ikea will probably change entirely, as the company is aggressively pursuing a new, digital identity through its evolving wave of experimental apps.
“The business model of Ikea having a blue box in a cornfield, and you jump in the car with your family and have an ice cream [at the store], is not the only thing we should offer our customer,” says Michael Valdsgaard, leader of digital transformation at Ikea. “For the majority of people in the world, Ikea isn’t accessible. Apps can make Ikea accessible.”
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Ikea VR App ©Ikea
To Ikea, none of these apps is necessarily the answer, but a step toward figuring out what the Ikea customer experience looks like on a smartphone, one UI trick at a time. “How do you create this whole vision of the customer journey, and plug in all those capabilities?” Valdsgaard asks. He admits that Ikea will eventually consolidate some of its apps–like Ikea Place and Ikea Catalog–into one more comprehensible experience. But the company isn’t there yet, because Ikea is still sussing out the strengths and weaknesses of its various apps.
“The visual search is one of the things that clicks fast and easy. Everyone instantly gets it,” says Valdsgaard of the new GrokStyle partnership. “To me, it’s very obvious, in the future you’re going to search either verbally or visually. How we’ve searched until now doesn’t make sense for the coming decade.”
“In VR, people love it, but don’t use it,” he continues. “Then you go into AR–people love it, but half can’t use it because they’re not used to it yet.”
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Ikea Place ©Ikea
In the meantime, the company is decidedly humble about its current offerings despite the fact that Ikea Place, its most successful app, has been downloaded 2 million times and boasts an estimated 1 million “repeated” users. For now, Ikea wants to keep the rate of its own experimentation high, while not worrying about failure. And as long as the technology works, the company is okay if the market doesn’t respond.
“I think what we do push out is of a good quality,” says Valdsgaard. “And then we can ask, ‘is it a big hit, or not a big hit?’ We just want to explore . . . [Then] I think you will find, in the next three to five years, we’re going to have a range of ways to interact with Ikea, from big blue buildings on the freeway to a completely digital interface, to anything in between.”
Source: Co.Design