Can IKEA disrupt the furniture business again?

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. There are worse ways to spend a lazy Saturday than to take a trip to one of IKEA’s giant furniture stores. Young children can be swiftly deposited at Småland, the supervised play area, leaving you to navigate the maze of flat-pack furniture and bric-a-brac at your leisure; you might even stop at the restaurant for a plate of Swedish meatballs.

IKEA’s cheap products—and its knack for getting shoppers to walk away with bagfuls of adornments they never knew they needed—have made it into the world’s biggest furniture company, with €48bn ($53bn) in annual sales last year. The company, which is held privately through a bewildering network of foundations, controls around 9% of the fragmented global furniture market. In an effort to keep growing, it has been investing in its e-commerce offering and adding new store formats.

Its latest experiment, in second-hand furniture, could help it get both bigger and greener. In the past few years IKEA has been busily trying to make buying its wares more convenient, particularly for customers without a car. As much as they might enjoy wandering around one of its giant stores, many shoppers do not have a day to spare to buy two folding chairs, says Jesper Brodin, the boss of INGKA, which owns most of IKEA’s shops (though not its intellectual property).

Online sales, which the company was initially slow to adopt, have been a priority since the covid-19 pandemic, when nearly all IKEA shops were closed. They now account for 23% of the total. IKEA has also been moving its stores closer to customers.