IKEA's India Challenge

The Swedish Home Furnishings Giant Is Aggressively Pushing Into The Indian Market, But Leading Domestic Brands Are Not Ready To Give Up Market Share Without A Fight

- Arnab Dutta

It was a typical June morning in Bengaluru. The garden city showed off its best weather temperature at a cool 23-25 degrees, marginally overcast sky, slight drizzle at times, the sun peeking through now and then to spread warmth and cheer.

Traffic, though, was quite the opposite. Crowded. Exasperating. Especially on NH75 near Nagasandra. Traffic had come to a standstill. But the reason was not only rush hour. If you looked closely, you could see cars queued up to enter a new, elegant, blue building bearing the legend “IKEA”. Once your car got in and got parked, you had to endure another serpentine queue of smiling, curious folks. The store opened at 10 am, but chances are you spent three hours in various queues before you finally got inside the building.

Not that this dampened the enthusiasm of Bengaluru residents, who thronged the maze of aisles and rows of the 460,000-sq. ft store in the thousands to take a peek at IKEA’s signature furniture, Japanese kitchen knives, and other snazzy products. A grinning Ram Babu and his family were caught up in the frenzy. Babu, a bureaucrat, and father of three teenagers, was checking out the vast range of affordable cutlery on his wife’s invitation, but had great difficulty managing an uncompromising crowd that conveniently ignored his elbow jabs, even as his daughter Sheetal lost herself in search of decorative plants. The 1,000-seater restaurant on the second floor of the Blue Box—the nickname of a standalone IKEA large-format store—could be accessed after enduring a wait of an hour as Swedish meatballs and mango pastries flew off the shelves. But the thousands of visitors, the Babus included, were in no mood to check out anytime soon.