IKEA will open the first projection studio in the Czech Republic. It is investing a billion in online shopping

IKEA has not yet announced the date of the opening of the planning studio or a specific location, the company’s representatives stated at Tuesday’s press conference. Details should be published before the summer.

“We are looking for an ideal place where a lot of Praguers go and where they shop,” said IKEA Business Manager Federica Barberis. She added that it could take place in a shopping center or on a busy street. According to her, it will be the first projection studio out of many planned.

She has already worked in the center of the capital IKEA. The small store, where customers could plan a kitchen or pick up a small purchase, operated on Wenceslas Square for about a year, until August 2019. Company representatives subsequently stated that the so-called IKEA Point was only a temporary project designed to test a similar operation.

In the past financial year, which lasted from September 2019 to last August, IKEA recorded double-year sales on the Internet. Employees processed up to 30,000 orders a week, said Mounia El Hilali, the company’s director for the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia.

The company wants to focus on improving online shopping in the near future. It will invest in IT systems and logistics capacities. Last year, it opened three dispensing points in the regions, and this year three more will be added to them, in the Pilsen, Karlovy Vary and Ústí nad Labem regions.

One of the new services this year is a guaranteed purchase of used children’s furniture. Club members who no longer need the piece of furniture will be able to sell it back to IKEA for a predetermined price. For example, if the furniture is sold within one year of its purchase, the customer will receive approximately 60 percent of the original price.

IKEA is a Swedish furniture company that has been operating in the Czech Republic since 1996 and on the domestic market. It operates four department stores, two in Prague, another in Brno and Ostrava. 9.1 million people visited them last year. Revenues for the last financial year for the company fell by 166.5 million crowns to 10.5 billion crowns, the profit decreased by about eight percent to 1.1 billion crowns.

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