On Tuesday, April 29, there is feverish activity at the Essensai 067 Experience Centre on Whitefield-Hoskote Road. There is one day to go for Swedish home furnishings retailer IKEA to throw open its first ‘Plan and Order Point’ (PaOP) in India and the staff is busy adding finishing touches to the curated setups.

The 740 sqm space is nowhere comparable in size to the flagship store in Nagasandra, but serves the retailer’s aim to expand – both in format as well as geographically – to serve bustling East Bengaluru.

There were a few curious customers who were already exploring the store when The Hindu was invited to take a sneak peek at the store. Pooja Grover, Country Expansion Manager, IKEA India, finds a green couch in a living room set up where a child is playing next to a kids’ chair. “We are four stores old in the country, and for a while we did not expand further. But now we have some plans to expand the physical stores. What we are focusing on is accessibility and convenience. Our main name in this phase of growth is to be accessible to many people. We wanted to be in the East for a very long time,” she said, as she explained the vision behind the PaOP.

Purpose of new format

Spanning 740 sqm, the new format, according to IKEA, serves as a dedicated customer meeting point, bringing expert home design knowledge closer to customers with personalised consultations, flexible planning support, and seamless installation services.

The PaOP, Grover said, is comparable to a design planning studio in the local market. “It gives you a personalised service for your home planning needs. You have the option of using one of our home furnishing consultants. You also have the option of doing it yourself. After the planning, the orders are placed and then you have the option of taking it online or having it delivered to your home or you can have a pickup option from here or you can have a pickup option from Nagasandra,” she explained.

“In terms of size, of course, Nagasadra is the mother store at 40,000 sq. mt store, while this is 740 sq. mt. In terms of articles, the mother store has 7000 plus articles. Here, we have quite a lot of articles displayed and we have a curated range for pickup. You will anyway have access to the full range by digital means. It’s more like an omni channel approach what we’re trying to explode and move towards the next phase of growth,” she said.

On why Bengaluru was chosen to start the first such store, she said IKEA’s focus is on the six cities – Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi, Pune and Chennai. “Bengaluru by 2030 is expected to have a home furnishing potential of about 216 billion INR. It’s a huge growth market, along with Delhi. And it’s one of our priority markets, so we are exploring to have quite a few of stores in various formats here. Why east of Bengaluru? It’s the IT hub, and because of that, you have a lot of young professionals here who are well-travelled, diverse, and from all over the country. If you do a mapping of the residential hotspots, you can see there’s huge amounts of residential catchments being added in the east along Hosakote and Sarjapur and these areas,” she further said.

Asked if there are more such PaOPs in the pipeline, she said they are exploring options of other store sizes and formats and the the needs and choices will vary based on catchment and availability of real estate and various other factors. “For example, in a residential hotspot, we will go for a PaOP like this, but if I have to open something in the centre of Bengaluru where there’s hardly any new homes happening, there I might cater to the need with a small store which has cash and carry items and takeaways for your home refresh. So, we are trying to tailor the format to the local characteristics of that particular cluster,” she further said.

Grover revealed that IKEA has more smaller stores planned in all the six cities.

‘Pin code mapping’

She also spoke of how the retailer caters to each city differently. “We do our life at home studies and then we try and figure out what is the home size, how people live, how people work, what are their needs. To give a few examples, when we are doing our room settings, in Mumbai, it will be smaller than Bengaluru, while in Hyderabad, it will be larger. And now we have taken it a bit more to the specific needs of the clusters, now that in the existing markets, we have a better knowledge as to where our customers are buying, what they’re buying. So we are taking it to the next level of catering to not only the city needs, but also going to a bit more to the pin code mapping and understanding what the cluster requires.”

Asked if they have noticed a difference in needs of the Nagasandra store in comparison to the Whitefield one, she said in East Bengaluru, there are young professionals focussed towards storage, organising, and choices based on global travel. “The family sizes differ, and there is also the owner-renter combination. Here (Whitefield) the homes are more rented, while there the homes are more owned,” she added.

How markets compare

Responding to a question on what IKEA’s biggest learnings have been since they opened their first store in India in 2018 in Hyderabad, she said, “In Europe and in other countries, it’s the third generation of people who are exposed to the brand. Here, if you’ve traveled abroad, then you’re aware of the brand, yes, but otherwise, it is the first generation. Second, from the needs perspective as well, our needs are very different from those of the European homes. So some of the products get tailored for those particular requirements as well.” Some of the cook shop range, for instance, is focused on the Indian home requirements such as pressure cookers, she said.

“We have plans to increase local sourcing to a substantial number in the next few years. There will be a lot of tailoring to the Indian homes’ requirements in terms of function, colour, taste, etc,” she concluded.