IKEA

IKEA is a Swedish-founded, Swedish-headquartered multinational conglomerate that designs and sells furniture, kitchen appliances and home accessories, among other goods and home services. Started in Sweden in 1943 by 17-year-old Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA has been the world's largest furniture retailer since 2008. The brand used by the group is an acronym that consists of the founder's initials, and those of Elmtaryd, the family farm where he was born, and the nearby village Agunnaryd.

As of March 2021, there are 422 IKEA stores operating in 50 countries and in fiscal year 2018, €38.8 billion (US$44.6 billion) worth of IKEA goods were sold. All IKEA stores are operated under franchise from Inter IKEA Systems B.V., most of which are operated by IKEA Group. Some of them are operated by other independent owners.

The IKEA website contains about 12,000 products and there were over 2.1 billion visitors to IKEA's websites in the year from September 2015 to August 2016.

In 1943, Ingvar Kamprad founded IKEA as a mail-order sales business, and began to sell furniture five years later. The first store was opened in Älmhult, Småland, in 1958, under the name Möbel-IKÉA (Möbel means "furniture" in Swedish). The first stores outside Sweden were opened in Norway (1963) and Denmark (1969). The stores spread to other parts of Europe in the 1970s, with the first store outside Scandinavia opening in Switzerland (1973), followed by West Germany (1974).

By 1973, the company's expansion was so great it was straining resources. German executives accidentally opened a store in Konstanz (Germany), approximately 200 miles (320 km), from their intended location of Koblenz (Germany). Later that decade, stores opened in other parts of the world, such as Japan (1974), Australia, Canada (1975), Hong Kong (1975), Singapore and The Netherlands (1978). IKEA further expanded in the 1980s, opening stores in countries such as France and Spain (1981), Belgium (1984), the United States (1985), the United Kingdom (1987), and Italy (1989). Germany, with 53 stores, is IKEA's biggest market, followed by the United States, with 51 stores.

IKEA entered Latin America in February 2010, opening in the Dominican Republic. As for the region's largest markets, until 2020 it had not entered Mexico and it has no stores in Brazil.

In August 2018, IKEA opened its first store in India, in Hyderabad.

In November 2021, IKEA opened its largest store in the world, measuring 65,000 square metres (700,000 sq ft), in the Philippines at the Mall of Asia Complex in Pasay City.

IKEA stores are typically blue buildings with yellow accents (also Sweden's national colours). They are often designed in a one-way layout, leading customers counter-clockwise along what IKEA calls "the long natural way" designed to encourage the customer to see the store in its entirety (as opposed to a traditional retail store, which allows a customer to go directly to the section where the desired goods and services are displayed). There are often shortcuts to other parts of the showroom.

The sequence first involves going through the furniture showrooms making note of selected items. The customer collects a shopping cart and proceeds to an open-shelf "Market Hall" warehouse for smaller items, visits the self-service furniture warehouse to collect previously noted showroom products in flat pack form. Sometimes, they are directed to collect products from an external warehouse on the same site or at a site nearby after purchase. Finally, customers pay for their products at a cash register. Not all furniture is stocked at the store level, such as particular sofa colours needing to be shipped from a warehouse to the customer's home or the store.

Most stores follow the layout of having the showroom upstairs with the marketplace and self-service warehouse downstairs. Some stores are single level, while others have separate warehouses to allow more stock to be kept on-site. Single-level stores are found predominantly in areas where the cost of land would be less than the cost of building a 2-level store. Some stores have dual-level warehouses with machine-controlled silos to allow large quantities of stock to be accessed throughout the selling day.

Design services

The first US Planning Studio located in Manhattan, United States

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, to facilitate social distancing between customers and accommodate the increased volume of customers who were booking IKEA design consultation services, IKEA stores in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain improved their design consulting process by piloting Ombori's paperless queue management system for the brand.

IKEA announced in March 2021 the launch of IKEA Studio, enabling customers to design full-scale rooms with Ikea furniture on an iPhone in this Apple-only project for IKEA.

Smart home

In 2016, IKEA started a move into the smart home business. The IKEA TRÅDFRI smart lighting kit was one of the first ranges signalling this change.[69] IKEA's media team has confirmed that smart home project will be a big move. They have also started a partnership with Philips Hue. The wireless charging furniture, integrating wireless Qi charging into everyday furniture, is another strategy for the smart home business.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, IKEA has been facing major supply chain issues since 2021, which could extend into 2022. Jon Abrahamsson, the chief executive of Inter IKEA has stated that the main issue is shipping products from China, as a "quarter" of IKEA products are made there.