work / ikea × tks
They love the store. They can't see themselves in it.
A strategy engagement for IKEA, run through The Knowledge Society. The finding that reframed the whole brief was not that Gen-Z dislikes IKEA — they love it, they hang out there. It's that every showroom is laid out for a life they don't have yet, so the one thing the store does best, helping you picture it, stops working exactly where the next generation of customers is standing.
primary survey + practitioner interviews · 19-page recommendation · 6-year roadmap
delivered as a recommendation · not built
the problem
IKEA's showroom is a demo. You walk through rooms that have been arranged for you, and the arrangement is the sales pitch — not the furniture, the picture of a life the furniture is in. Our own respondents said this back to us without being asked. One compared it to trying clothes on instead of looking at them on a rail. Another called it "a simulation of a dream home."
Then the same people told us the rooms were not theirs. The layouts are built for households with more square footage and more permanence than a dorm or a first shared flat. So Gen-Z gets the enjoyable walk and skips the part where they imagine buying — the mechanism works and then aims slightly past them.
That reframing matters because it changes what you build. If the problem were "Gen-Z doesn't like us," the answer is marketing. If the problem is "our best mechanism doesn't point at them," the answer is a second showroom — one they lay out themselves.
the research
Two sources, kept deliberately distinct. Our own primary work — a consumer survey plus interviews — produced the verbatim reactions above and the read on how Gen-Z actually uses the store. Alongside it we leaned on published research for scale we had no business claiming ourselves, including an international study of 79,000 consumers aged 16–22 across 45 markets. That number is theirs, not ours, and the deck said so; a borrowed sample size presented as your own is the fastest way to lose the room.
The pattern the desk research kept returning: this is a cohort that treats creating as a daily activity rather than a hobby, believes creativity will be a workplace requirement, and is markedly more interested than earlier cohorts in building its own income rather than waiting to be given one. Self-expression shows up not as a preference but as something they link directly to living well.
We also went to practitioners rather than only to papers — people who had already shipped brand experiences in virtual space, including a metaverse researcher and co-founder who took the idea apart with us. The advice that survived was blunt and became the spine of the recommendation: a brand entering a virtual space has to be able to answer why first, because an inauthentic entrance is detected instantly and cannot be recovered from. And the metric to design against is participation, not reach — the number of people who make something, not the number who see it.
what we recommended
A browser-based world — not an app, not a headset — where you enter your room's real dimensions and lay it out with IKEA's catalogue. Browser because the cohort you are trying to reach should not have to install anything or own hardware to be reached.
The kiosk is the part I'd defend hardest. It is what stops this from being another brand metaverse press release: the virtual thing has a physical consequence, and the physical store gets the one asset it was missing — showroom layouts built by and for the people who weren't seeing themselves in the old ones. The loop closes in both directions.
Paying the creators is the other load-bearing piece. Engagement built on goodwill decays; engagement that pays people is a reason to come back after the novelty is gone. And the revenue share is not charity — the layouts are merchandising, and the people making them are doing work the company would otherwise pay a studio for. It also hands IKEA a live demand signal: which arrangements, in which room sizes, real customers actually vote for and buy from.
We staged it as a roadmap rather than a launch — platform and studio build, then a piloted in-store stage in selected locations, then wider rollout — because the in-store half is the expensive, hard-to-reverse half, and it deserved to be tested somewhere small first.
the honest part
It was a recommendation. It was not built, and IKEA's roadmap is IKEA's — this page claims a delivered piece of strategy work and nothing more.
With distance, the weakest assumption is the moderation and quality one: a gallery of user-made layouts displayed under a brand's name in its own stores is a curation problem long before it is a technology problem, and the deck treated that too lightly. The strongest part still looks right — that the physical–virtual link, not the virtual world, was the actual product.
why it's on this site
It's the same move in a medium with no code in it. Find the place where something already works and quietly fails a specific group of people, go ask them rather than assume, and build at the gap — then hand the thing over to the people it was for, and let them make it theirs.