Tulsa: Oil capital, art deco hub, future home of an IKEA store?

Can a city will an IKEA store into existence through love alone? Tulsa, Oklahoma is trying.



IKEA fans in Oklahoma’s second-largest city launched “ Tulsa loves I KEA,” a multi-pronged effort to get the Swedish furniture makers’ attention and convince them to come to town. The campaign has included a roughly four-hour chartered bus trip to Frisco, Texas for a shopping trip at Tulsa’s nearest IKEA location, and an art installation made from more than 30 of the brand’s Mammut children’s tables. The campaign’s website, which acts as an information hub, is branded in the IKEA style. About 100 messages have been added to an open letter online.



“I dream of Swedish meatballs and the smell of wood veneers every night,” wrote Jesse in one message.



[Image: Tulsa Loves IKEA]



The campaign is more creative than your typical city or state economic development campaign to woo jobs to a local area. From June 13 to 16, local chefs are opening a pop-up restaurant called Tulsma that will feature IKEA-inspired dishes, like a Swedish pancake cake and a hotdog made from potato lefse, fresh sausage, caraway pickled beet cabbage, ground mustard, and crispy onion. Yes, there will be meatballs. The four-day pop-up restaurant is the work of et al , a collective of Tulsa chefs, and reservations are already all filled.



“Tulsa knows how to rally around a shared goal, and this campaign for an IKEA store has gotten a ton of enthusiasm and love,” Annie Chang, head of content at Gitwit , the agency running the campaign, tells Fast Company . “It’s been a wholesome, feel-good initiative. As far as campaigns go, Tulsa Loves IKEA is an easy one to get onboard with.”



IKEA opened its first U.S. location in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania in 1985, and today the company has 51 stores in the U.S . from Tempe, Arizona to Oak Creek, Wisconsin. But there’s still a serious dearth in the middle of the country. There aren’t any IKEA stores in Oklahoma, Nebraska, Iowa, or Arkansas. Missouri and Kansas each have just one store, respectively. And again, the nearest IKEA to Tulsa is in Frisco, Texas, over 200 miles away. That’d be a tough errand to run in a day. Despite that and Tulsa’s best efforts, though, IKEA says it doesn’t currently have plans for a store there, though it does appreciate the interest.



“We are always looking at new opportunities for expansion and growth in the United States,” the company’s U.S. press office told Fast Company in an email. “There is an extensive process to see whether a market can support an IKEA store, and where a market stands with respect to other metropolitan areas.”



Getting an IKEA location in your city or town is hard work, and unlike the Mammut children’s table, there’s no instruction manual.