1 in 10 people in Israel suffer from serious disabilities, struggling with the most basic home activities: turning on the light, getting up from bed or opening a closet. IKEA’s closets, too, unfortunately. For them, IKEA furniture may be affordable, popular and beautiful - but many times, it’s also unusable. Basically, IKEA is the face of their battle at home: that couch, that chair, that lamp that are almost perfect but are actually really difficult to use.

This was a brand perception problem, but we also saw a business opportunity: to provide value by making better and easier the everyday life of people with disabilities, in turn challenging a market that had sold people with special needs overpriced and ugly furniture.

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.

In a perfect world, IKEA furniture would already work for everyone. IKEA set out to get closer to perfect, teaming up with the 2 nonprofit organizations specializing in accessibility to develop a series of modifications to fix IKEA’s popular pieces.

The first step? Turn our target audience into our no.1 advisors. Weeks of working together ended with 2 valuable insights:

1. People with disabilities don’t want to feel special, they want to feel NORMAL. They don’t want their own special IKEA - they want everyone’s IKEA.

2. It’s the small things manufacturers tend to miss and the small things that could make IKEA’s products more accessible.

In order to truly meet the needs of our target audience we decided to bring their input into the project. During a one-week hackathon, hosting our product engineers, designers, accessibility experts and psychologists, thought about solutions, each solving a different accessibility problem.

Our breakthrough was the decision to not launch a whole separate line, but instead to create special ability hacks for the IKEA products. We have developed a range of add-ons conceived to solve the most common problems, and work with the iconic products of IKEA: sofa elevating-legs for easier ascend, lamp button-enlargement, super-zipper for pillows-covers. Thus, we optimized our user experience by simplifying it to the fullest: free and easy download and assemble with IKEA furniture.

ThisAbles project hacks the iconic home-furniture giving access to IKEA’s designs in an affordable and easily accessible format: using 3D printed, open-source solutions.

To make it truly accessible, we made the add-ons completely free: open-source, available to 3D print, from anywhere in the world. Additionally, to make it even easier we added a full web-series of video-tutorials. For those who wished to experience the products up close, we opened the first-ever accessible space, in the IKEA stores.

The response rate within the special needs target audience was off the charts: what started in Israel, became 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% increase bringing 280,000 unique visitors more than last year’s campaign.

Even more, the global access to IKEA retail footprint turned ThisAbles into the biggest platform for people with disabilities.

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 celebrities 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.

Most importantly, we met our business target in 2 critical engagement points: the sales of the supported products grew by 37% in volume, while the overall revenue grew by 33% versus the same period in 2018.