As a Colorado Springs Mortgage Lender, I am always interested in learning about business models of various companies. Last week I had opportunity to visit the new IKEA store located in the Centennial; what an experience to say the least.
If you have never been to an IKEA store, picture a gigantic blue cube with big yellow letters across the front. How big? Information I have read indicates 415,000 square feet of big. Basically the size of a small shopping mall all devoted to home furnishings, accessories and of course Swedish meatballs.
Now maybe it had to do with the fact that it was only the second Saturday since the grand opening, by this Colorado Springs Mortgage Lender’s first IKEA experience began with parking lot attendants directing traffic as cars streamed onto the 13.5 acres site. While one website indicates they have 1,500 parking spaces in the building, we actually ended up parking in an overflow lot of a neighboring shopping center.
After a small wait just to enter the store, we embarked on a journey similar to a salmon swimming upstream. You see, IKEA has arrows directing the flow through the store, but since the area we wanted was towards the end, we decided to fight the current for the sake of time. The store is arranged in sections based on the functionality of the furniture (bedroom, kitchen, media, etc), and there are approximately 50 different furnished rooms spread throughout the store. It is a very well designed showroom, and full of accessories for every room. They even have a 500 seat restaurant, I guess to provide the energy needed if you truly wanted to spend the day.
Once at our destination, we located the items we wanted and proceeded to write down their location by aisle and bin numbers , all the time thinking this will help a few of the 400 employees (they refer to them as coworkers) locate the items before loading them into our SUV. Boy was I mistaken. When we arrived downstairs at pick up, we soon realized that locating and loading was not the responsibility of any of the 400 coworkers, it was our responsibility to locate, pay for and load. While it was not difficult to locate and load the items, as they are all unassembled in flat rectangular boxes, it was more do-it-yourself than this Colorado Springs Mortgage Lender was expecting.
Once back home and unloaded, assembly of the nicely finished practical board furniture was very user friendly and required a minimal amount of common household tools. It appears their design and manufacturing process has been well thought out and somewhat perfected.
In addition to being satisfied with my visit to IKEA, this Colorado Springs Mortgage Lender was intrigued with the business side of IKEA. They obviously invest their resources into designing and building furniture that is easy to assemble and can be shipped and distributed in an efficient manner since all the boxes are flat and stackable. They focus on making their showroom very inviting and simple, which encourages shoppers to purchase the additional accessories needed to achieve a similar look at home, and they do so at a price point that promotes impulse buying. Different from most traditional home furnishing stores, but obviously very appealing to the consumer. Will I go back, certainly, why spend top dollar on furniture that will just be sold or donated once the kids leave for college.
