IKEA has always worked hard to satisfy everyone on every step of customer journey. All areas of the store were designed so families wanted to stay there for a long time. However, there was one area that wouldn’t support this approach—long checkout lines.

During the 75th IKEA anniversary, our activation turned this situation around by giving an unexpected and joyful experience to customers waiting in line. So they would leave IKEA with a smile.

In 2018, IKEA turned 75. While celebrating the anniversary, our task was not only to say ‘Thank you’ to every customer, but to make sure people felt that IKEA cared for each one of them and their in-store experience.

We found one area of the store, where this message of gratitude would make the most impact. Simply because it was the most boring place in the whole store.

We created an in-store activation named "Now Delivering Smiles" to show: when you’re in IKEA, even waiting in a long checkout line can be fun.

To deliver our message with impact, we repurposed one unexpected store facility never before used for fun in IKEA’s long 75 years. By using pneumatic tubes to deliver joy and smiles to the cashier zone, we shifted customers’ expectations and showed them that waiting in line can be fun.

IKEA takes pride in satisfying every customer’s expectations at every step of shopping experience. In 75 years, it has become one of IKEA’s core values.

Since our main TA was families with kids, we knew we had to make children happy first. Happy kids mean happy parents. Happy families mean happy customers.

Simultaneously, since we had no media budget and a very modest production budget (around a thousand euros to cover 14 IKEAs), we knew we had to come up with a smart cost-effective solution that would not require a lot of production, long timeframe or manpower involved.

While checkout lines were the biggest obstacle to achieving ideal end-to-end family experience, our task became shifting this around to make them the most fun place of the store.

So we turned to the most secure facility in the whole IKEA.

It took us a lot of negotiating with IKEA’s financial officers. We took pneumatic tubes, an existing mechanism previously used strictly for rational financial services, like changing money, and turned it into a channel for delivering smiles.

We recalibrated the system to deliver famous FABLER BJÖRN teddy bears. Every family at checkout was gifted a teddy bear delivered through pneumatic tubes.

Since the tubes were transparent and ran exposed near the ceiling, kids and their parents looked up and saw teddy bears flying through tubes to meet their new families. This spectacle left kids with positive anticipation to get to the checkout register and receive their gift.

As we used the already existing mechanism of pneumatic tubes and the already existing teddy bears as heroes of our spectacle, we didn't spend any resources on building additional facilities to deliver joy to our customers.

14 IKEA stores;

0 media budget;

1000 euros production budget: a cost of all teddy bears given out;

170 000 happy customers leaving IKEA with a smile;

IKEA turned what used to be the most boring touchpoint into the most fun one!