For $100, Ikea will design your next room

Ikea is already the world’s largest furniture company. Now, it’s poised to become the world’s largest interior design service.



Starting today in the U.S., Ikea’s interior designers will turn any of your rooms into a Swedish wonderland complete with furnishings, materials, and lighting. The price is $100/room for personal spaces and $300/room for businesses. This is a deal for consumers—considering the standard rates that range from $50 to $500 per hour—but great for Ikea, which not only will turn those designs into product and installation sales, but also open a new revenue stream from services rather than hard products.



[Photo: Ikea]



How it works



First, you fill out an online questionnaire in which you will describe your vision for the space. This “wish list”—as the company calls it—is then sent to one of Ikea’s professional interior designers, who will create the space for you over the course of three one-on-one video conference sessions hosted on the Ikea website. The designer will work with you to come up with a design you are happy with by creating a mood board, coming up with a layout, and finally producing the plans. These plans sound detailed, including “3D renderings, lighting plan, curated product list, home furnishing tips, and material suggestions.”



From there, you basically just need to click “buy” to get the products to materialize the design. Ikea’s promise is that it can do it all for you, for a price: “coordinate delivery, assembly, and installation by ordering products straight to the home or business and organizing necessary services such as furniture assembly with TaskRabbit to make the designs come to life.”



It’s not the first Ikea low-cost design service: The company has been offering kitchen design consultation for years (for that, Ikea charges $39 for up to two hours of planning or $199 for three hours in your own home). Expanding that service to new spaces seems like the next logical step.



[Photo: Ikea]



A shrewd service strategy



Ikea’s new service strategy is one that has worked very well for companies like Apple. Once thought only as a hardware/software design company, Apple’s services ranging from Apple Music subscriptions to Fitness+ now produce more money than McDonald’s and Nike’s total combined revenue, beating companies like Boeing and Intel by several billions of dollars. Ikea probably isn’t going to break the bank quite the same way with this new design service. After all, Apple’s services are subscription based, passively raking up millions of dollars per day. But, if the Swedish company nails their personal design offering, it’s most likely going to increase sales on Ikea products and installation.



More important, the service may greatly improve the consumer experience (CX) of shopping at Ikea, leading to increased consumer loyalty and more sales in the long run. This is something that worked really well for Ikea Canada, which opened Design Studios in Ontario and Quebec in 2021, small concept stores located in urban centers that offered personalized design services and one-to-one planning. That CX was a raging success, according to Forrester Research, pushing sales and customer satisfaction up. In fact, it helped the Swedish company jump a whopping 10 places in Forrester’s 2022 Canada Retailers Customer Experience Index Rankings.



Ikea’s new design-a-room service is not an in-person experience, but given how everyone has adjusted to video conferencing after the pandemic, the strategy seems sound. Besides, anything that allows me to avoid any physical store—but especially Ikea’s suburban hells—gets all the extra points from me.