Many Russians love IKEA for inspiring and relevant design solutions that they can get for free in the physical stores. And that’s what makes IKEA distinctive in the tough competitive environment.

But 80% of the consumers don’t have access to it as IKEA has its stores only in 12 Russian cities out of 1117. 60% of them continue to live in typical houses designed for convenience rather than comfort, not knowing how to fix it since they don’t have an opportunity to find free solutions adapted to their lifestyles and flats’ specifics.

IKEA aimed to unlock growth potential by expanding reach beyond the existing customer base concentrated around the physical stores. We were looking for an idea to respond to customers’ tension, therefore, to attract new visitors to IKEA online store (2mln), grow total sales by 13%, and increase average spend by inspiring people to buy solutions for whole flats.

We saw an opportunity to offer millions of Russians free interior designs which are tailored to their lifestyles and to their standardized apartments and could be purchased in one click.

For that, we've created a new touchpoint to interact with the brand — Apartmenteka. It is an online library of free interior designs created for real people living the reality of standardized housing. We inspired them to fall in love with their homes again with make-over ideas for their whole apartment and individual rooms. We showed people how to make most of their small-space and uncomfortable layout, and made it all easily obtainable with just one click of a button by linking Apartmenteka with the main e-com website.

IKEA targets 25-50yo Russians who look for the ideas to re-decorate and re-furnish their flat or a single room. They want to make sure their new living space is beautiful, functional and 100% fits the layout of their typical Russian flat.

To offer a solution for them, we started with analyzing the typical housing market. There is no single database of houses and its layouts in Russia, so we did a great deal of analytical work to collect and combine all the information from different sources with our hands, and then to select the most common series of houses for the launch of the project (by the number of people living there and the number of regions where those series were built).

Out of 231 series available in Russia 21 series have been chosen for the project with 8 million people coverage.

We chose 21 most common series of houses out of 231.

IKEA designers took the actual flat layouts and created design options that are tailored for different audience segments due to IKEA's 20 years' experience in understanding Russian customer needs. We tied each design to the addresses of the houses containing these layouts, making sure people can find their apartment by address, type of house & number of rooms, and choose a design solution. On the website, you can walk around your transformed apartment and see how it works. You can buy any item or furnish the whole apartment with just one click.

We created 176 design projects covering 3mln apartments and relevant to 8mln people. The launch was supported with PR and digital banners. Since then, we continually add new house series and new designs to the project.

• By 2021 we created 176 design projects covering 3mln apartments and 8mln people. The service continues to grow, as we include more house series and more design projects in the database.

• 2 761 967 new visitors came to IKEA online store and the new service landing page during the first half of a year since its launch.

• 11:55 minutes was the average time spent on Apartmenteka pages, which is 4 longer vs. ikea.ru.

• Thanks to the Apartmenteka project the average cost of purchase became 1400 rubles higher (up to 20 500 rubles per one purchase) (+7.3%).

• Total sales increased by 17% (vs. 13% planned) during 2019.

Plus:

• Total media reach was over 78.2mln impressions, including free media from the sources like Bloomberg.

• WARC has included Apartmenteka in the top 100 most efficient projects in the world for 2020.