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.”
For instance, Ikea VR lets you build a kitchen–and make virtual pancakes–inside an HTC Vive. Ikea Catalog builds digital rooms on your phone. And Ikea Place uses AR to drop full-scale digital furniture right into your room. Most recently, Ikea penned a deal with the visual search startup GrokStyle to let users of its Place app search for furniture using their smartphone camera.
“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.”
“It’s still early days for AR,” he adds a beat later. “I thought it would have gone a little bit faster with [Apple’s] ARkit and [Google’s] ARcore, because all of a sudden, hundreds of millions can use it. But it’s probably going to take a few years before it becomes something for everyday use.”
“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.”