• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, March 3, 2022

 

Ikea wants to give shoppers a new way to look at the future of furniture, with an immersive design experience in its Brooklyn store. And in return, it’s hoping to get a better sense of how people really feel about storage.

Called “Space Unfolded,” the month-long exhibition welcomes visitors into a room. Using dynamic projection mappings, shoppers can reshape the space to fit their curiosity, using manual toggles to compare designs.

Ikea is no stranger to weird mash-ups between digital design and physical retail. This is, after all, the company that recently bragged about interviewing tech candidates over 3D printed meatballs. And it was an early adopter of AR, introducing its AR app back in 2013.

This pop-up, it says, is sort of next-level AR. “While augmented reality is now quite familiar to many people, the scale of Space Unfolded is something beyond what the customer can experience at home,” says Lorna Montalvo, Ikea’s integrated media leader.

Visitors to the Space Unfolded experience are greeted with a kiosk, which helps guide them as they cycle through room sets projected in front of them. "Each room set has a special trigger for an Easter egg that will make visitors smile,” Montalvo says.

“We hope to gain insight on how our customers use new digital experiences to interpret and understand Ikea and how it can improve and simplify their home life.”

Those insights are especially important now. The surge in ecommerce has sharpened the digital skills of shoppers in just about every category, including furniture.

“In the last two years, a fair amount of our customers have expanded their use of digital experiences at home,” Montalvo tells Marketing Daily. “Because Ikea Space Unfolded is located in a physical Ikea store, what the customer sees digitally can immediately be viewed, physically interacted with and then purchased.” 

The event kicked off with a special preview for members of the retailer's loyalty program, and is open to the general public for the next month. A hype video invites people to come in and “shape the space to their imagination.”

Montalvo says that so far,  those exploring the activation have been enthusiastic about moving from the activation space to the store’s regular selling space. But Ikea isn’t necessarily considering expanding it to other locations: “We see it as a customer think piece and special reason to visit the store.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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