IKEA Piloting New "Pick Up Point" Store Format
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
The new stores are one-tenth or less the size of average stores and include top-selling items.
Swedish furniture chain Ikea is piloting a new “Pick Up Point” store format, creating two stores in Quebec City and London that are one-tenth or less the size of its average stores, running at about 20,000 square feet, according to the Consumerist.
The new store format represents a place where consumers can pick up Internet orders or buy a select number of the chain’s top-selling items. The store will feature five bathroom displays; four kitchen displays; three bed displays; four PAX wardrobe displays; 75 home furnishings displays; eight planning desks, and material and finish samples.
“I have had a goal from the starting point to make Ikea a bit more accessible for many Canadians,” Stefan Sjostrand, managing director at Ikea Canada explained.
If the idea works, it will spread to other areas that are too small to support full-grown IKEA stores. “If we see that it is a good thing, we will roll it out [elsewhere],” IKEA Canada president Stefan Sjöstrand told the Toronto Star. “If it’s not working, then we will have to try something else.” Canada seems like a good choice to try this out: it has a relatively spread-out population, and very few IKEA stores relative to the number of people who live there and who presumably need furniture.
"Canada is the second biggest country in the world and we have only 12 stores," said Stefan Sjostrand, president and chief executive officer of Ikea Canada, in an interview with the Star.
"We haven't expanded so much lately. We could see that this was a good opportunity for this marketplace. We have a conservative approach to expansion. It's important to us to make sure we don't expand too quickly."
On impetus behind the new pilot is to reduce delivery charges for customers, which some see as prohibitive. For example, Sjostrand explained that delivery of a kitchen from the Ikea store in Burlington to a London home can run as much as $450, but with the new London pick-up point, customers can reduce that cost by either picking items up themselves or opting for delivery within London for $80.
The Canadian pick-up stores will open in late 2015. The retailer has pick-up stores in Spain and Greece, and will open one in Thailand this summer, according to the Financial Post.