Organizing your home can be daunting at the best of times, let alone when home is an office, school, the gym… IKEA is a recognized leader in organization solutions and their unique in-store showroom experience teaches consumers how to tackle and adapt for every need and every budget. But because people weren’t coming to the store to be inspired by the showroom, IKEA had to find a new and innovative way to replicate that experience at home.

The key objective was to highlight the solutions IKEA has to offer to get any home organized from clutter. In order to do this, we had to create a new kind of experience to build awareness of IKEA’s affordable solutions to organize consumers’ homes and adapt to their needs from home.

There were many types of clutter, clothes on furniture, messy surfaces, and now work stuff invading home spaces. IKEA store traffic was down due to lockdown, depriving IKEA of one of their primary sales tools, their showroom, where they inspire and educate their consumers on home organization solutions. So, IKEA needed to find a way to inspire and educate people who are unable to access the store.

Using the idea of an escape room, we leveraged a social platform that was accessible and understood by our users to tap into the frustration clutter was causing. Using an AR lens on Snapchat, we showed how IKEA has adaptable and accessible organization solutions to combat clutter in every space, giving people the satisfaction of “escaping the clutter.”

Typically, consumers start every year with ambitions to be more organized and productive. With pandemic lockdown, families on top of each other all day and home spaces doubling as work and school spaces, this need took on new meaning.

With IKEA store traffic down during lockdown, consumers were deprived of the inspiration and education around home organization that the in-store showrooms provided. We needed to bring that experience to people where they were, in an accessible and engaging way.

We researched the specific areas of clutter causing the most stress during lockdown and, with an AR lens in Snapchat, we built those into an escape room themed game that users could organize their way out of with the help of IKEA solutions. This made showcasing our organizational solutions fun, engaging and relevant to IKEA’s Improver target, eager to find solutions to “escape the clutter.”

There were many types of clutter, clothes on furniture, messy surfaces, and now work stuff invading home spaces. Using the AR lens capabilities within the popular Snapchat app, we were able to bring the iconic IKEA showroom organizational expertise into an accessible format where most people were already planning home solutions — their phones. By pushing the platform to its limit, in ways never before seen on Snapchat, our creative and technology teams were able to create an experience that was educational, engaging and got people talking.

Knowing that organizational planning and buying is highest in the beginning of the year and peaks in springtime, the “Escape the Clutter” Snapchat lens launched to the public on a 3/1/21. We launched with sneak peek to IKEA Family members that rolled out on 2/27 and was live throughout the month of March with paid support until 3/12.

From 185k paid impressions, IKEA garnered 29.6MM earned impressions of the lens and Snap Ad and over 12MM interactions with the AR lens with an average play time of over 1½ minutes. All this excitement earned us tremendous uptake in a broad range of press outlets from technology to home décor. The combination of innovation, humor and timely relatability have garnered considerable earned media from diverse publications, keeping IKEA relevant in the cultural conversation, positioning the brand as a creative innovator and reinforcing its relevance as an accessible authority in storage and organization.