Ikea challenges Vinted and Wallapop with the launch of its second-hand furniture sales platform

Ikea has launched Ikea Preowned in Spain, its new platform for buying and selling second-hand products from the Swedish brand to give them a second life, challenging platforms such as eBay, Vinted and Wallapop. The CEO of Ingka, the main operator of Ikea stores, Jesper Brodin, welcomed the launch of this initiative, as he told the English newspaper ‘Financial Times’, as reported by Europa Press. “This was a dream that we had been wanting to make a reality for some time. We are at a time when we can do more advanced and great things. There is incredible confidence that the company will evolve digitally,” he stressed. In this way, Brodin has announced that Madrid and Oslo are the cities chosen to test this platform until the end of the year and after the tests carried out in these countries, the objective is to extend it to all the countries where the Swedish multinational has a presence. Ikea Preowned aims to tackle the second-hand market by allowing customers to sell directly to each other, a sector in which Brodin says Ikea has a larger market share than in the sale of new furniture. The Swedish multinational says this initiative is part of a set of efforts it makes to reduce the use of resources and the transition to a circular business. “We hope to encourage waste reduction and extend the life of our products by finding a new home for them,” says Ikea on its website. For the Ingka Group, this includes offering services to customers such as buying back products that are no longer needed, providing assembly parts, investing in companies such as ‘RetourMatras’, which recycles mattresses to turn them into materials for new mattresses, and advocating and positively influencing the private sector and governments to promote the transition to a circular economy. In this way, the new second-hand furniture sales platform, like buying on Ikea.com, searches for items near the customer, agrees a price and a collection point between the buyer and the seller. With the launch of Ikea Preowned, the Swedish multinational is strengthening its commitment to sustainability and the circular economy, where it had the ‘Ikea ​​Circular Market’, where you could buy from a selection of products to give them a new life: products that have returned to the store thanks to the buy-back service, discontinued products or items with minor aesthetic damage.