Pa. store launches Ikea's growth surge
By Clint Engel -- Furniture Today, January 13, 2003
Conshohocken, Pa. — Ikea will open its new U.S. flagship store in this Philadelphia suburb this Wednesday, launching an aggressive North American expansion strategy and a new look with a much broader home furnishings assortment.
The 325,000-square-foot store replaces Ikea's first U.S. store, a 160,000-square-foot unit about 10 minutes away in Plymouth Meeting. With it comes Ikea's full North American offering of more than 9,000 items (up from about 6,500 in Plymouth Meeting), from sofas to dining tables to malt glasses.
Forty-six room displays emphasize traditional to modern design with function at popular prices. Five fully furnished, in-store model homes are decorated for various lifestyles, including a single mother and her daughter, and a young family with two children.
While the model home displays aren't new to Ikea, the new store features perhaps the most realistic one yet — a fully framed home with exterior walls, where shoppers can walk around the entire perimeter.
The Sweden-based home furnishings giant, with 24 stores in North America and more than 175 worldwide, expects the new store to generate sales of $100 million in its full first year, compared with $71 million at the store it replaces.
It's the first of nine North American stores Ikea is opening this fiscal year, which ends Aug. 31. It also kicks off a 10-year growth strategy on the continent that will add 50 net new stores in new and existing markets and $2.8 billion or more in furniture, bedding and accessories sales, according to Furniture/Today estimates.
"It took us 25 years to do nine stores in Canada," said Pernille Lopez, president of Ikea, North America. "Now were doing nine (in North America) in eight months. That's unusual for us to build that many in a very short period of time."
Through August, Ikea will relocate three more stores this year as well as open new stores in the Montreal suburb of Boucherville; the Toronto suburb of Vaughn; Paramus, N.J.; College Park, Md.; and East Palo Alto, in the San Francisco Bay Area.
It will relocate two to three stores and open four more stores in fiscal 2004 — a third Bay Area store in Dublin, Calif.; a second Philadelphia-area unit in Penn's Landing near the waterfront; its first Boston-area store in Somerville, Mass.; and a New Haven, Conn., store.
By fiscal 2005, Lopez said, Ikea is looking to open in a couple of its top new-market targets, which include Atlanta, South Florida, Dallas-Fort Worth, Detroit and Phoenix. It also hopes to further fill out the New York market with a Brooklyn store.
Meanwhile, Ikea is introducing several firsts in Conshohocken, including:
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A new square-grid layout for its lower-level Marketplace for accessories, lighting, tabletop and other small items. It has wide aisles, easy access and clear views of each department as well as a central Market Hall Café, where shoppers can buy a quick cup of Swedish coffee and snacks.
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Multi-product displays of home furnishings categories that work best together, such as bedroom and bath and kitchen and dining.
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The "travelator," a long, wide escalator that carries consumers and their loaded carts from the checkout area down to a 550-space underground parking area that supplements an 850-space surface lot.
Also new to the store is Smaland, a children's play area that's an activities wonderland, with pools of balls that look like berries, a climbing wall and puppet-show and movie stations.
