Ikea, it seems, is a genius at selling Ikea-flat packing, transporting, and reassembling its quirky Swedish styling all across the planet. Today the Gwangmyeong store, which is the company’s largest in the world by shopping area, is on track to become one of Ikea’s top-performing outlets for 2015.
It misjudged the number of parking spaces needed, and a seemingly benign map for sale upset some customers: The body of water east of Korea was labeled the Sea of Japan rather than the East Sea, as South Koreans prefer.īut the Koreans seem, for the most part, to have forgiven the Swedes. “We need to get these things right or we will never be taken seriously.”Įven with all that careful planning, Ikea managed to get a few things wrong. But six years? “The more global, the more complex it gets,” replies Mikael Palmquist, the regional manager of retail for Asia Pacific. “They are ferocious about not expanding too rapidly,” says David Marcotte of consulting firm Kantar Retail. (Chalk that up to Ikea tradition rather than to South Korean custom.) Ikea celebrated the opening in December with a tree planting rather than ribbon cutting. In all, it took about six years for Ikea to unveil its inaugural store in South Korea, in Gwangmyeong, starting from the first scouting trip.
#World domination in retrospect how to
It took more time to figure out how to showcase kitchens that incorporate kimchi refrigerators, a uniquely Korean appliance-and even more time to untangle nuances of the market, like the South Korean’s preference for metal chopsticks.
It took more time to solve certain mysteries, like how big to make the store’s children’s section in a country where kids are often given ample space in the family living quarters. It took some time to figure out just the right shopping complex, off just the right highway interchange and just the right distance from Seoul, that could accommodate a 624,000-square-foot store-that is to say, one more than three times the size of the average Wal-Mart Supercenter.
0 kommentar(er)
