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48 I Eastern Europe bne May 2021
IKEA has a total of 49 stores in Central and Eastern Europe, and plans to open at least another dozen in the coming years.
IKEA’s New Europe Empire
bne IntelliNews
Far from today’s big boxes with everything from spoons to a complete kitchen and, of course, IKEA meat balls, the Swedish furniture store’s beginning in Poland was in
a dreary metal sheet shed in a dreary Warsaw district of Ursynow. Reportedly, it was the only building around with an entrance wide enough for getting a bed through it.
The year was 1990 and Poland had just emerged from decades of communism only a year earlier. Consumerism
had arrived, with shelves of slick but affordable furniture and accessories highlighting the failure of socialism
to produce anything anyone actually wanted to buy.
IKEA’S first store – called the IKEA Start Shop and advertised as “Extraordinary furniture store from Sweden” – offered a bit of everything, like it still does today; except the range of items on offer was smaller and most shoppers could only
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afford a few small items. The average monthly wage in Poland back then was barely over $100.
Three decades on and the Polish IKEA caters to millions of customers a year. Nearly uninterrupted economic growth and rising wages – the average gross pay packet is some 13 times larger than it was in 1990 – have ensured an ever- expanding market for the company’s products.
Today the Polish IKEA has 11 flagship stores across the country – including three in Warsaw – and one under construction. These are not the tin sheds of the first outlet, but the full-blown trademark yellow and blue labyrinths that are so familiar to the rest of us.
The group also operates a property development company, 20 factories, and a banking services offshoot, Ikano Bank.
The company’s size in Poland makes the country of 38mn people the “second
most important country for IKEA from the production point of view, just after China,” according to IKEA’s website.
IKEA’s 2019 revenue from retail only came in at PLN5bn ($1.3bn), rising to just over PLN10bn, if all of the group’s activities are accounted for.
In a slightly less-known story, 1990 was only the year in which IKEA entered Poland as a retailer. Poland’s history of co-operating with the Swedish furniture maker dates back decades earlier, to 1961, the year IKEA ordered a furniture factory in Radomsko to deliver 500 Ögla chairs made of bent beech wood.
Moscow opening
You could make a crude index from matching the opening of an IKEA outlet to a country’s economic development. The Polish IKEA opened when the country had just won its independence but had yet to taste any of the fruits of the new economic ideology. The same