Ikea is the first ever major-retailer to democratize the use of its furniture by making it accessible to people with disabilities. How did we do it?

Inspired by Ikea’s mission “to create a better everyday life for as many people as possible”, we knew that we had to take the lead and in turn challenge a market that had sold people with special needs overpriced and ugly furniture.

1 in 10 people in Israel is suffering a form of physical disability. This audience struggles with tasks others take for granted, such as opening a closet, switching on a lamp or getting up from a sofa (IKEA’s sofas too, unfortunately).

Our brief was straightforward: open a new market for IKEA by bridging the gap between IKEA’s products and the special needs of people with disabilities. Strategically, rectifying this situation posed a double win for IKEA: tapping into an old-new audience, one that craves IKEA furniture which they could easily use & fixing the one major dissonance the brand was facing - creating a better life, truly for everyone. This is IKEAs ThisAbles project.

This insight shaped our approach: rather than design a new line of special-needs furniture which will be more expensive and not scalable, we would hack our existing designs with a range of add-ons to make our most accessible products accessible: sofa elevating-legs for easier ascend, lamp button-enlargement, super-zipper for pillows-covers.

Introducing ThisAbles by IKEA: democratizing home-furniture for people with disabilities with 3D printed add-ons.

In order to create a really comprehensive IKEA EXPERIENCE, we had to exceed expectations, to ensure 2 major conditions are fulfilled: firstly, we had to provide the IKEA design quality: beautiful, functional, and simple. Secondly, it had to be affordable and easily accessible.

We made the add-ons fully accessible, virtually and physically: open-source designs, available to 3d print, from anywhere in the world. And to enable people with disabilities to watch, touch and experience them, we constructed the first-ever accessible space in the IKEA stores.

We can only imagine the daily struggles people with disabilities go through in order to survive in the outside world - public transportation, stairs, restaurants, shops, and the list goes on. You’d expect that their own home would be a place of comfort, but the truth is that is at home where they are reminded the most: “you are disabled”.

By listening to the insights coming from the community we have found out what people with disability truly want – to be part of the mainstream, not singled-out as being different. They wanted to enjoy what the same things everyone else did, including furniture.

Partnering with the leading non-profit MILBAT and Access Israel, during a one-week hackathon, hosting product engineers, accessibility experts, psychologists, IKEA designers and people with disability themselves – we created add-ons that can be used with IKEA’s most iconic products, each solving a different accessibility problem.

The project is open-source and continues to grow with the solutions proposed by users themselves, based on specific needs and insights, adding new add-ons every month.

To promote the idea, we reached out to social media influences who suffer from disabilities themselves and who could deliver our story in their communities. We told real human stories, of persons living with disability and the benefits the add-ons can bring to their lives. Our main spokesperson is Eldar, a disabled Israeli who is suffering of cerebral palsy. Eldar talked about the challenges he faces at his own home, and afterwards we showed, mostly visually, how Eldar and other persons, living with different disabilities, experiences a real change with our new add-ons.

What started in Israel, proved to be a global solution through our online platform: More than 45,000 people from 127 countries visited our website and downloaded the add-ons. We also drove a 1500% traffic increase to the websites of our partners - non-profit accessibility organizations. Finally, the visits to the IKEA website had a 28,5% traffic increase, with 280,000 unique visitors more than last year’s campaign.

The campaign was covered by major titles like Independent in UK, Washington Post in US, Fast Company, CNN Espanol, The Verge, etc... This helped us to organically activate influencers and micro-influencers, from different markets, starting with A-class influencers like Ashton Kutcher. From then on, we tapped into the local communities, driving the adoption of the project. The campaign finally reached 489 million people globally with an earned media value of $4 millions.

More importantly, this proved a viable business opportunity, as the sales of our products supported by the add-ons grew by 37% in volume, while the revenue grew by 33% versus the same period in 2018.

Finally, the global access to IKEA retail footprint and experience turned ThisAbles into the biggest platform for people with disabilities