Ikea’s Web App Brings Interior Design to Soviet-Era Apartments
The retailer is driving sales in Russia using a service that lets users customize their cookie-cutter dwellings.
An Ikea store in Moscow.
Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg
Ikea has been diversifying its business model as fewer consumers trek to the big-box suburban showrooms that helped turn it into a furniture giant. In Russia, it found a way to replicate part of that shopping experience on the web—thanks to a preference for uniformity among Soviet city planners.
About 60% of Russians live in standard, Soviet-era apartment blocks, which have a limited number of designs and floor plans. Ikea has replicated the layouts on its Russian website and given them virtual makeovers, allowing a customer to select suggested items and furnish her entire apartment with a few clicks of the mouse.