The furniture trade is a fierce battle in Austria. To attract customers, Swedish furniture store Ikea is cutting prices by as much as 15 percent and launching a new, free 3D room planner that should make it easier to decorate your own four walls.
The domestic furniture trade is feeling the consequences of the Austrians’ thrift. While a lot was spent on furniture during the pandemic, consumers are now putting on the brakes. A lot of thought goes into before making a new investment. To score points against the competition, the Swedes lower the prices of thousands of products. Mr and Mrs Austrians then save up to 15 percent. The concrete figures will be presented next week.
But customers are not just interested in the money. According to the Life at Home Report 2023, 87 percent of Ikea buyers say they want to feel comfortable in their home, but need support to visualize and realize their home dreams. Especially when purchasing online, they are often not sure whether the products they want fit in their living room or the furniture they already have, for example. That’s why they now want to score points with a new, free 3D room planner in the Ikea app, with which you can record and design your own living spaces using artificial intelligence. Products are “deleted” and replaced with new ones. “In the first step there is the program for bedrooms, living rooms, work and dining rooms,” reports Claudio Winkler, Country Digital & Business Development Manager IKEA Austria. More applications will follow.
This is how the app works
The individual design of the living spaces is central to “Ikea Kreativ”. A wide-angle shot of the room is taken with the smartphone and saved in the Ikea profile. The ‘Furniture Eraser’ feature allows you to clear the entire room or digitally remove specific items, such as an old sofa or shelf. You can then select new Ikea products and place them in the virtual living space. These are displayed to scale and adapt realistically to the lighting of the room. If you don’t have a cell phone at hand, don’t want to scan your house or only work on a computer, you can set up interactive 3D exhibition spaces. There are more than 50 available. Interested parties then have the option to insert, move, rotate, hang or remove products as desired. Ikea plans to continuously expand its showroom offering.
You can then share the designs with family and friends or publish them on social media platforms. If you want to implement the room design, you can then place individual products or the entire room furnishings in your shopping cart and order online. Another variant: Put it on your watch list and test or see the parts in real life the next time you visit a furniture store. “The tool is another important part for Ikea as an omnichannel retailer. “Using this patented technology, the shopping experience can be further simplified,” says Winkler. Ikea Kreativ launched in the United States in 2023 and is now used in eleven other countries.
The Swedish furniture store has a turnover of around one billion euros in this country and has a market share of around 13.3 percent. Consumers can choose from eight locations across the country. In addition, there are six smaller planning studios of approximately 200 square meters in which kitchens or cabinets are put together by experts. Another studio will open in the Auhof Center in western Vienna on April 7.
Source: Krone
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
