BUSINESS Bloomberg Businessweek February 10, 202016
PHOTO: SERGEI BOBYLEV/GETTY IMAGES. ILLUSTRATION: COURTESY IKEA○ The retailer launches a
web service for customers
in cookie-cutter apartmentsIkea has been diversifying its business model as
fewer consumers trek to the big-box suburban
showrooms that helped turn it into a furniture giant.
In Russia, it found a way to replicate part of that
shopping experience on the web—thanks to a pref-
erence for uniformity among Soviet city planners.
About 60% of Russians live in standard, Soviet-era
apartment blocks, which have a limited number of
designs and floor plans. Ikea has replicated the lay-
outs on its Russian website and given them virtual
makeovers, letting a customer select suggested items
and furnish her apartment with a few mouse clicks.
The service, called Kvartiroteka—“selection
of apartments” in Russian—has brought 2.8 mil-
lion visitors to Ikea’s site since last June’s launch,
mostly new customers, and contributed to a
17% jump in sales in Russia in the fiscal year thatIkea Solves Soviet
SAMENESS
Three Ikea makeovers
for the P-44, the most
common apartment
configuration in Moscow
Buildings with P-
apartments are typically
17 floors
About 1,500 towers
were built from 1978
to 2000 in the Greater
Moscow area
They were designed
by the Moscow
Scientific-Research
and Design Institute
of Typology and
Experimental Designended in August. Russia is Ikea’s fastest-growing
market after Hungary, and the company is weigh-
ing whether to expand the offering to places with
similar communist-era housing stock, including
Germany, Poland, and China.
“Many people couldn’t believe that they could
do anything good out of this standard typical plan-
ning,” says Pontus Erntell, head of Ikea’s Russia
business. “The idea was to show that there can be
lots of different things to do and to inspire people to
do something to change their lives in their homes.”
The Swedish furniture giant is trying to remain
the world’s top furniture retailer without rely-
ing so much on its roughly 30,000-square-meter
(323,000-square-foot) blue-and-yellow stores,
where customers fuel up on Swedish meatballs
before navigating a maze of showrooms and a