Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yup. The sofas are softer in America, you sink into them, whereas in Europe, you know, yeah. Funny. Around this time, I think when they were observing, the US stores were not in great shape. They were open to the idea of individuals franchising IKEA stores. Now they had this structure in place, they thought maybe this is an interesting thing for former longtime IKEA employees to do to open up a store. They did an experiment starting in Seattle. The idea from Ingvar was, if you have your own wallet on the floor, how do you do compared to the corporately-owned stores. It was essentially like a bake-off and a test to see if the bureaucracy was hurting them, or if they had too many layers of management, or if they had more innovative marketing ideas, which the independently-owned stores, specifically the Seattle one absolutely did, created their own marketing campaigns. It became pretty divergent. The Seattle store was actually a leased old Boeing warehouse that ended up being laid out pretty differently than other IKEA stores. You get what you ask for. If you want different ideas, the concept is going to end up being pretty different. They only opened one or two more despite the fact that the locally-owned stores, well the Seattle store, actually did way better. We think it was the highest-performing US store and beat all the corporate owned ones. Despite doing another deal in San Diego and another one in Houston, eventually they wanted to bring the learnings back to the mothership, to have them all be homogenous, so all the US stores are now operated by Ingka. But for anyone in Seattle that during the 12 years of independent ownership visited that store, it actually was a pretty different thing with very different marketing materials than anyone else in the US was getting. Was it in the same location that the current one is down in Renton?…

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