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For the first time since its founding in 1943, Ikea is making it possible to shop for a piece of its furniture in a store other than its own. Historically, Ikea has run a solely direct-to-consumer business model, selling its wares exclusively through its iconic big blue box stores and via its website. Now, though, the company is breaking that mold through a new partnership with Best Buy. Beginning in fall 2025, small Ikea kiosks will begin popping up in Best Buy stores in Florida and Texas, combining Ikeas signature room-specific furnishings with Best Buys range of home appliances. The move represents another step in Ikeas yearslong plan to diversify and expand its retail footprint. In 2025, that looks like finding new ways to appear in physical storefronts without the investment required for a typical 300,000-square-foot Ikea behemoth. [Image: Ikea] A one-stop shop for your dream kitchen According to the company, Ikeas cross-brand retail experience will launch in 10 stores throughout Florida and Texas. Each will feature 1,000-square-foot Ikea storefronts that showcase inspirational kitchen and laundry room settings, including embedded Best Buy appliances such as refrigerators, dishwashers, microwaves and washers and dryers. Both Ikea representatives and Best Buy employees will be available to help customers plan their spaces and order the items on display. The Ikea display items will not be warehoused at the Best Buy sites, but customers can place orders through the Ikea representatives for shipping and in-home delivery. In a press release, Ikea shared that the goal of the collaboration is to create a one-stop destination for customers to design their dream kitchen, storage area, or laundry space. The Ikea growth strategy in the U.S. is to create a more accessible, easy, and convenient shopping experience for many people, says Rob Olson, chief operating officer for Ikea U.S. Physical expansion takes time, and by partnering with Best Buy, we can enter markets sooner, introducing new customer meeting points at a faster pace. It also allows us to penetrate existing markets in a much deeper way, as we can open shop-in-shops focused on how consumers like to shop, [putting] Ikea closer to where they live in the process. Ikea’s retail experiments Since 2018, Ikea has experimented with a series of small-format stores that deliver a pared-down version of the brands physical retail experience. These plan-and-order points with pickup typically include a small storefront with a few popular Ikea items and a team of staffers dedicated to helping customers plan and order furnishings for big design projects. According to Olson, Ikea had opened 10 such locations by the end of fiscal year 2024, and its already cut the ribbon on six additional locations in 2025; more will debut before the end of the year. In an interview with RetailSpaces last year, Olson referred to these new-format stores as an avenue for the brand to literally get closer to its consumers, considering that Ikea’s large locations often require fans to travel out of their way to browse in-person. By opening shops-in-a-shop through Best Buy, it looks like Ikea is pursuing another opportunity to show up where its customers already are.
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E-Commerce
A new 3D-printed model takes advantage of the design of the Nintendo Switch 2’s snap-on magnetic controllers by turning the video game console into a french fry holder.The GamiFries rig has magnetic connectors that allow the Switch 2’s controllers and screen to snap on in two modes, handheld and controller.It’s built to hold a medium-size order of fries, with a circular carve-out thats perfectly positioned to show the McDonald’s golden arches logo. An anonymous user with no other post history uploaded the model as a free download with fair-use promotional images in McDonald’s red and yellow.[Image: user7R135/MakerWorld]“We’re fans of 3D-printed models and how we can use them to bring ideas to life, especially for small-scale fabrication,” the creator behind the model told Fast Company in an email. “You can have an idea and suddenly it becomes a product. Then you have to hope that people find it funny or useful.”The Switch 2 has inspired a host of 3D-printed accessories on sites like MakerWorld since Nintendo released the console in June. The Switch 2 sold 1.6 million units in the U.S. in one month, making it the fastest-selling gaming hardware in U.S. history, and it’s become the fastest-selling Nintendo console of all time globally. [Image: user7R135/MakerWorld]GamiFries joins gaming chopsticks holders, a Pizza Hut video game pizza warmer, and Nintendo Switch soda cups as the latest innovation in gaming-snack accessories, a novelty category well suited for fast food like french fries. It’s also especially well suited for streamers.A 2023 U.K. report by the entertainment wiki hosting site Fandom found “gamers are 50% more likely than the average person to value taste over nutrition,” while gamers’ top snack purchases trend toward salty (41%) over sweet (33%).Seems like gamers might just be natural spokespeople for fast-food and snack brands that want to get their products in front of consumers.
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E-Commerce
After two decades as an industrial designer working on products like augmented reality glasses Lauryn Morris was ready for a change. I was really becoming jaded with the status quo of the linear economy, she says. Most products still take a one-way journey from raw materials to a landfill. Sustainabilityincluding what happens at a products end of lifeis usually an afterthought. Morris had seen the impact of climate change firsthand, when a wildfire in 2020 burned through a property that she and her husband own near Los Angeles. And she wanted to rethink her role as a designer. I wanted to not be part of the problem anymore, she says. I wanted to counter all of the waste that I was a part of over the last 20 years, and then show other people in the hardware world how we could challenge it and think differently. Lauryn Morris In 2023, she took a sabbatical to explore what she wanted to work on next. She took time to rechargeworking with her hands and spending time outsidewhile reading as much as she could about climate solutions. She went through the Climatebase fellowship, a 12-week accelerator program that helps professionals pivot to careers focused on climate. She could have taken several different paths. But she ended up taking inspiration from her own life: She loves driving vintage cars, and she wanted to find a way to help convert more existing cars on the road to EVs. Right now, EV conversions are typically custom projects. Morris had looked into converting her own car, a gas-guzzling 1975 Datsun, to electric. I started calling shops in Southern California and found two-year-long wait lists and really high price tags, she says. Auto shops do long, complicated, bespoke conversions and full restorations. Alternatively, there are companies that sell DIY kits for consumers to convert some models, like VW Beetles. But those hobbyist projects can also take months or years in a garage. [Photo: Dan Coronado/courtesy Nice] Its never really been interesting to me to do small projects, Morris says. Thats where the industry has been with gas-to-electric conversion. I wanted to take my experience working in mass production and apply principles of scale to reuse. How can we remanufacture things at scale? She saw the opportunity to make the idea of EV conversions mainstream. “I think that designers and product strategists are the missing key to make circularity more desirable and more normal for the way that we all consume products,” she says. While it’s not realistic to convert every car on the road to electric, Morris argues that conversions can make a “significant dent” in the adoption of EVs. She launched a startup called Nice (a reference to what people would say when they pulled up next to her vintage Datsun at traffic lights in L.A.: Nice car.) In 2024, the startup joined the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator to pilot the idea, starting with a 1987 Suzuki Samurai. The car is a cult favorite. Its really unique looking compared to modern vehicles, Morris says. Its a cute little boxy SUV. And its not rare. The idea is finding identical vehicles to convert in batches. [Photo: Dan Coronado/courtesy Nice] The company’s process involves doing R&D oncefiguring out where a battery and electric motor can fit, and the exact configuration neededand then repeating the process, making it both faster and more affordable. As the company moves forward, it will focus on cars that are newer and even more plentiful on the road, making it easier to scale. Currently the team is working on the first challenge: building the infrastructure to easily source used parts from retired Teslas or other electric cars. Our pilots with Suzuki Samurais proved the demand. People loved them,” Morris says. “I cant tell you how many people have reached out to have their Samurais converted. But the real bottleneck wasnt interest. It was infrastructure. When Nice converted its first two Samurais using the same process and parts, the cars performed differently because the second-life batteries they were using were different. “We found that the information we were able to get from the suppliers who were selling those second-life parts was very minimal,” Morris says. “There’s not a lot of transparency.” [Photo: Sarah Lyon/courtesy Nice] If you buy a used battery from a Tesla Model S, for example, you won’t know what year it was made or how it was used, from the climate it was driven in to how it was charged. More detailed diagnostics are possible but aren’t commonly used by resellers. So Morris is building a platform that can reclaim parts and certify their performance. Beyond cars, the second-life batteries can be used for energy storage. Some used EV batteries have enough life left to be a good fit for use in another car, while others are too drained but could still be used for years to store energy. [Photo: Sarah Lyon/courtesy Nice] “We’re seeing these two massive trends converge,” Morris says. “Hundreds of thousands of EVs are starting to age out of their warranty. The first wave of EVs is now retiring, and so there’s just this big wave of end-of-life EVs. Then we’re also seeing this exponential growth and demand for energy storage.” While others, like Redwood Materials, are beginning to use second-life batteries for large data centers, Nice plans to serve the thousands of commercial and industrial applications that need the same batteries but can’t easily source them. For most customers today, sourcing parts is still a game of guesswork and finger-crossing,” Morris says. “Thats the gap Im focused on closing as a founder: building the connective layer between salvage supply and second-life demand, and ensuring these assets are accessible, safe, and reliable far beyond EV conversions. The challenge, she says, is not so different than other projects she’s worked on in the past. “I just find it so fun and invigorating and energizing to learn about something really complex,” she says. “I didn’t get into augmented reality or head-worn computing knowing everything there is to know about computer vision and display technology, but you learn it along the way. It’s the same principle, where you study and understand the subject matter and think about what the goals are, what the value propositions are.” But Morris is more focused now on the bigger picture. “I realized that my role going forward in my career needs to be less about designing a new beautiful object and more about designing a system and looking at the value chain across all of these objects that we need in our lives,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with these products being in our lives. But the people responsible for making themindustrial designers, engineersare uniquely positioned to advocate for challenging that status quo of linear thinking.”
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E-Commerce
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