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19 Mar 2020 IKEA to launch new AR capabilities for IKEA Place on new iPad Pro

Today IKEA announces Studio Mode – a new upcoming feature for IKEA Place that will harness the capabilities of Apple’s new iPad Pro to create a more personalised and realistic home furnishing experience. IKEA Place is already one of the most popular AR apps available today. Studio Mode takes it to the next level by interpreting users’ existing homes to render home furnishing solutions that complement their space and style. Studio Mode also uses detailed 3D depth information to digitally furnish walls, ceilings, seats, table tops and other previously hard-to-reach places for AR applications. The quality and fidelity of the 3D models are more realistic than before. Even dynamic lighting fixtures can be turned on or off to light up the virtual scene. “AR experiences thus far have been limited by they can understand and react to the environment within which they’re taking place. Studio Mode with the new iPad Pro presents powerful proof of the potential AR and AI have to deliver more meaningful, personal, and playful experiences at home with IKEA,” says Kaave Pour, Director at SPACE10, IKEA’s research and design lab. The ultimate goal is to inspire people by combining technology with knowledge of life at home. “We’re using inspiring new technology like ARKit to make IKEA home furnishing knowledge accessible for everyone,” says Gerry Rogers, Digital Transformation Leader at Inter IKEA Group. “To do so, we are looking into the newest technologies, not for the sake of technology, but to create a better everyday life for the many people.” The updated IKEA Place app featuring Studio Mode will be available later this year.

18 Mar 2020 Aline Santos joins Inter IKEA Holding B.V. Supervisory Board

Aline Santos, Executive Vice President Global Marketing and Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer at Unilever, will become a member of the Inter IKEA Group Holding B.V. Supervisory board from 1 June 2020. Aline has a great passion and experience for brand-building with purpose at the heart. She is globally responsible for marketing and brand communication, and she leads strategy and initiatives to drive gender balance and inclusion. With more than 30 years’ experience, Aline has built many well-known brands within the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) segment. Having started as a marketing trainee, she has run Unilever global businesses since 2005. Unilever products are currently sold in 190 countries. Aline is Brazilian, and she brings valuable experience from Latin America, where she worked in the early years of her career. “I am happy Aline is joining the Inter IKEA Group Holding BV Supervisory Board,” says Chairman Anders Dahlvig. “With her professional experience, passion, strong leadership and authentic, warm and engaging style, I am confident Aline will greatly contribute to IKEA’s continued journey to create a better everyday life for the many people.” For more information contact: Media.Franchisor@Inter-IKEA.com +31-62-124-0618Read more about Inter IKEA Group on Inter.IKEA.com.

11 Mar 2020 IKEA invests in doubling its in-house design department

IKEA has taken a strategic decision to grow its in-house design team with almost twice its size over the coming two years. The decision to scale up the number of designers is a step in meeting the IKEA growth plans as well as developing and strengthening the brand's design identity.   “At IKEA, we want to offer desirable and affordable design to customers around the world. But people´s demands and expectations change with time, and we need to develop too, to stay relevant in our offer continuously. For many years, as we grew our business and entered new markets, we kept our in-house design team roughly the same size. We see now, with our current expansion plans and movements to deliver to our vision of creating a better everyday life for the many people, it´s time to invest and add more in-house design competence to meet these needs and ambitions”, says Emma Dafnäs, Range and Product Design Manager at IKEA of Sweden. Today, IKEA has 18 in-house designers working with product development across the entire range. As an in-house designer, you are often part of several design projects at the time and, together with our product development teams and freelance designers, you contribute to approximately 2000 new products that are developed each year. In the heart of the IKEA product development is the Democratic Design model, meaning that all products are beautiful, functional and affordable with built-in quality and sustainability. The ambition is to grow the in-house design department with roughly twice its size in a stepwise approach over two years. First recruitments will start this spring. IKEA of Sweden in Älmhult, Sweden, is and will continue to be the heart of product development and design within IKEA but there also some designers stationed at the IKEA Product Development Centres in Delhi, India, and Shanghai, China. “Design has been at the core of IKEA product development from the early years, and we are proud of our Swedish heritage, where function and beauty work in harmony in every product. Our designers are here to ensure and develop strong IKEA design identity in our product range as we continue to meet the needs and dreams of the many people in life at home. Staying close to our suppliers and understanding the production capabilities, we will continue using design to find new innovative and sustainable product solutions at affordable prices to meet the high ambitions IKEA have set”, says Eva Lilja Löwenhielm, Design Manager at IKEA of Sweden. In addition to this investment, IKEA will continue the successful and important work with an extensive network of freelance designers as well as design collaborations.Read more about working at IKEA on about.IKEA.com. An interview with Eva Lilja Löwenhielm, Design Manager at IKEA of Sweden, can be found on IKEA Today.

10 Mar 2020 IKEA partners with Alibaba to open the first virtual IKEA store on Tmall

Delft/Shanghai, March 10, 2020 – IKEA and Alibaba announce the opening of the IKEA virtual store on the Alibaba e-commerce platform Tmall. The partnership with Alibaba enables IKEA to become more accessible for the many people in China and allows IKEA to test and learn how to meet customers in a new way. On March 10 Inter IKEA Systems B.V. (owner of the IKEA concept and global franchisor), IKEA Retail China and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. launch the first virtual IKEA store during a digital signing ceremony via Taobao Live Streaming from IKEA Shanghai Baoshan and Hangzhou Ali Park. The virtual IKEA store on Tmall will offer around 3500 IKEA products and home furnishing solutions. The virtual IKEA store on Tmall offers Chinese consumers access to IKEA in a new and virtual environment by focusing on how IKEA can improve and support Chinese customers to live a better life at home. The partnership provides an opportunity for IKEA to learn about this new format as a complement to its existing customer meetings. Based on this test IKEA will evaluate if and how third-party platforms fit into IKEA’s channel mix. In recent years IKEA has been testing new formats and solutions in various markets around the world to increase accessibility to IKEA. Examples of this are the opening of smaller shops, planning studios, IKEA apps, new service solutions and many more. IKEA has also launched e-commerce in more than 50 markets. “At IKEA we are very proud of our iconic IKEA store, with more than one billion visitors every year worldwide. At the same time we’re always curious about how to improve and learn. We are happy about this collaborating with Alibaba. I’m convinced that we will learn a lot from this test” confirms Jon Abrahamsson Ring, Managing Director of Inter IKEA Systems B.V.“We are continuously exploring how we can make IKEA home furnishing solutions and range more accessible as we want to deliver to the IKEA vision of creating a better everyday life for the many. The launch of the virtual store at Tmall is truly exciting and we believe that it will complement existing sales channels such as our IKEA stores and e-commerce as we come closer to our customers in China, says Tolga Öncü, Retail Operations Manager, Ingka GroupChina as a market has shown a strong digital development within a unique and advanced digital environment. We are committed to bringing IKEA closer to the many Chinese consumers both online and offline by offering diverse meeting points which Chinese consumers prefer. “IKEA is the world's leading home furnishing retailer and loved by many Chinese consumers,” said Jiang Fan, president of Tmall and Taobao at Alibaba Group. “It is truly exciting for us to help IKEA explore online channels and to enable more Chinese consumers to purchase IKEA products with greater convenience. The collaboration with IKEA also demonstrates that Tmall continues to be the major platform for international brands’ digital operations and the gateway to China.”