IKEA's retailing environment

IKEA is a Categrory Specialist in Furnishing products.

Furnishing Products

IKEA offers a huge variety and deep assortment of furniture. They have furniture catered to people of all walks of life including babies, children, youths and adults. Their furniture is divided into many different categories for different areas in the house including the living room, bedroom, kitchen etc. Various categories of their furniture include: cooking, decoration, laundry, eating, outdoors. IKEA believes that play is the basis for how children learn, develop and become who they are. Therefore, they have catered a category range specially for children called Children’s IKEA. Products include toys and furniture for children for all ages. For example, Children’s IKEA offers fun furniture such as tents and canopies as well as hanging and swivel chairs. Toys have different categories such as soft toys, wooden toys, role play etc. IKEA provides a comprehensive series of furniture to suit the different needs of customers.

VARIETY
A S S O R T M E N T	Living Room	Bedroom	Kitchen	Children	Textiles
	Sofas and armchairs	Beds	Kitchen Cabinets	Baby cots and toys	Rugs
	TV stands and media solutions	Mattresses	Interior Fittings	High chairs and changing tables	Curtains and blinds
	Coffee and Side tables	Bedroom Storage	Appliances	Children Beds and mattresses	Blankets and throws
	Living Room textiles and rugs	Mirrors	Work tops	Children furniture and storage	Place mats and dining textiles
	Living Room Lighting	Bedroom Lighting	Sinks and Mixer taps	Children toys	Cushions and cushion covers

Some of the myrait of choices available:

Other Category; Food and Beverage

IKEA offers a wide variety of food in its restaurant to cater to its customers.  Choices of food include their very own Swedish cuisine as well as local delights. IKEA even has a special menu catered to customers who are Halal or vegetarian. IKEA also has a food market that offers Swedish delicacies in the form of food products. The company believes that it can not only provide Swedish furniture but also Swedish food products as well. Examples of food products include frozen-packed Swedish meatballs and salmon, Lingonberry syrup and Horseradish sauce. Furthermore, IKEA outlets also have a bistro specially catered to shoppers who want to grab a light snack or drink after shopping. They offer food items such as chicken hotdog, ice-cream etc.

VARIETY
A S S O R T M E N T	Breakfast	Traditional Swedish Dishes	Vegetarian Dishes	Local Delights	Halal	Desserts
	Scrambled Egg Set	Swedish Meatballs	Pizza	Curry Chicken	Halal Nasi Padang	Princess Cake
	Pancakes with Hard Boiled Egg	Cold Water Prawns	Pasta with tomato sauce	Nasi Lemak	Halal Meatballs	Punsch Roll
	French Toast Set	Shrimp Sandwich	Organic Pancakes	Local Fried Rice	Halal Chicken Wings	Raspberry Cheesecake
	Waffle	Baked Chicken Leg		Scoop Laksa	Mee Rebus	Swedish Apple Cake
	Tuna Breakfast Platter	Salmon with potatoes and vegetables		Mee Siam	Mee Soto	Chocolat Mousse

Some of the yummy food available:

Challenges IKEA faced

IKEA, the world's largest furniture retailer also faced challenges either in their competitors, retailers or their supply chain.

One of the challenges IKEA faced in on their challenge in enforcing supplier sustainability. This is due to IKEA who aims to be an eco-friendly company by reducing the emissions of CO2 and greenhouse effects and had plans in using 100% renewable energy in its long-term goal. IKEA is also trying to keep to their minimum requirements in terms of environmental and their social and working conditions.

However IKEA faced this problem in China, which is their largest source of home furnishing where they produced and manufactured most of the products in that country. The percentage of the direct suppliers of IKEA did not meet the IKEA requirements in terms of workers compensation and environmentally. Hence there are still major challenges related to wages, working hours, overtime compensation, lack of unions and social insurance. And one factor that is contributing to the difficulties is the high presence and mobility of migrant workers in China.

They did not meet the IWAY code of conduct which is known as IKEA way which comprises of IKEA supplier Code of Conduct. It comprises of the IKEA minimum requirements relating to the Environment and Social & Working Conditions including child labor.

Hence this is a challenge for IKEA in terms of managing their workers in the supply chain which is to make it more sustainable because the workers are working more than 60 hours per week which did not meet the requirements of the code which they are trying to reduce. And by reducing to the requirements when enforcing it will be another challenge for IKEA because they would have to make trade-offs due to its low-cost furniture that IKEA markets. Therefore it would mean that IKEA may have to use less quality products and lower unit margins in their furniture to meet their IWAY requirements.

Challenge 2

Another challenge IKEA faced is in Singapore which is in regards to the accessibility of IKEA in Singapore. Much speculation has been made about the accessibility of IKEA in Singapore in local forums and blogs and most of them find it very inaccessible to shop in IKEA.

In Singapore there are 2 IKEA outlets which one is located in Alexandra and the other in Tampines. For the Alexandra outlet, it was stated in their website that getting from anywhere from the MRT either from Queenstown MRT, Red Hill MRT or Commonwealth MRT, it does not reach IKEA directly and it is required to take bus trips from there which has became quite a hassle for travelling there. Adding on, previously there is a shuttle bus going from Seng Kang to Alexandra IKEA, the shuttle bus is not functioning anymore. The sources are actually taken from SgForums where people complained there. Although IKEA had made plans to counter their inaccessibility by implementing a free parking promotion scheme for IKEA Alexandra from Aug 2010 to July 2011, not everybody drives.

For the outlet in Tampines which is the one that our group visited, we personally feel that it is really inaccessible too. Firstly it is located only in the very East of Singapore which is Tampines and hence people from the central and the west part of Singapore would unlikely go visit as there are other furniture stores out there like Courts and Harvey Norman in most shopping malls. Next, the shuttle bus came after 45 minutes of waiting beside the Tampines MRT station and we find it very time consuming and troublesome. That was from our personal experience. Based on their website on how to go to IKEA Tampines, you have to take bus there from Tampines MRT, Punggol MRT, Buangkok or Seng Kang MRT in order to reach there. And the bus trip usually takes around 20-30mins depending on where you take from.

Hence the accessibility of IKEA is hard to reach in Singapore for normal Singaporeans which is a challenge faced by IKEA in Singapore. As quoted from one of the posts in SgForum by a user,

“shuttle services are always crowded.... because its free
Suntec City, Turf City etc.
If charge money, no one will want to go there already.
especially so for turf city and tampines.. so inaccessible for those using buses.”

Therefore this shows that other Singaporeans find it difficult to access there too.