We used a large array of data on Russian houses, apartments, and layouts, manually collected from various sources (from Russian real estate officials', Google Maps, and other open sources), as well as data on different audience segments (based on a variety of consumer research, conducted at IKEA), combined and analyzed them to create an online library of design solutions relevant to people’s needs and living conditions.

Many Russians love IKEA for inspiring and relevant to local living conditions design solutions that they can get for free in the physical stores. And that’s what makes IKEA distinctive in the tough competitive environment.

But 80% of the consumers don’t have access to it as IKEA has its stores only in 12 Russian cities out of 1117 in total. Millions of them live in typical houses with standardized layouts not knowing how to make it more comfortable and individual since they don’t have an opportunity to turn to professionals or to find free solutions adapted to their lifestyles and flats’ specifics.

That’s why IKEA started to search for an instrument to make its design ideas accessible and relevant for not less than 7 mln Russians (for the first year), therefore, to attract new visitors to IKEA online store (2mln) and grow total sales by 13%.

The idea is based on two main data insights:

• Based on IKEA Life at home research (2018-2019), we found out that there is a strong need in design solutions that 100% adapted to living conditions in Russia: looking for the ideas 40% of people are interested in how to locate furniture in a smart way, 32% look for the furniture that 100% fit their flat size and layout.

• Based on The Federal Service for State Statistics’ and Russian real estate officials’ data, we discovered that 80 mln (60%!) of Russians live in flats with typical layouts. They were built in 1945-1995, when people were massively moving to cities, and had to solve the problem of mass settlement, and not convenience and individuality.

That’s what let us create the first and only online library of design solutions for the whole country tailored to every person’s needs and living conditions.

IKEA targets 25-50yo Russians who look for the ideas to re-decorate and re-furnish their flat or a single room. They want to make sure their new living space is beautiful, functional and 100% fits the layout of their typical Russian flat.

To offer a solution for them, we started with analyzing the typical housing market. There is no single database of houses and its layouts in Russia, so we did a great deal of analytical work to collect and combine all the information from different sources with our hands, and then to select the most common series of houses for the launch of the project (by the number of people living there and the number of regions where those series were built).

Out of 231 series available in Russia 21 series have been chosen for the project with 8 million people coverage.

Based on the chosen series, we produced 3D flat layouts and checked their correctness with the Real Estate Technical Inventory Bureau.

Then, IKEA interior designers from 12 cities of IKEA presence had been involved in designing the flat layouts to secure insightfulness of offered solutions. Since the brand has a huge knowledge base about local consumers, designers received briefs with specially composed audience portraits.

As a result, we came up with Apartmenteka, an online library of free design solutions for different apartments and lifestyles. We tied each design to the addresses of the houses containing these layouts, making sure people can find their apartment by entering their address or type of house and choose the interior design. On the website you can walk around your transformed apartment, have a look at furniture and see how it works. You can buy any item or furnish the whole apartment with one click.

• By 2021 we created 176 design projects covering 3mln apartments and 8mln people. The service continues to grow, as we include more house series and more design projects in the database.

• The average cost of purchase became 1400 rubles higher (up to 20 500 rubles per one purchase) (+7.3%).

• 2 761 967 new visitors came to IKEA online store and the new service landing page during the first half of a year since its launch.

Plus:

• IKEA's investment in APARTMENTEKA's development (analytics, design projects, database creation, website etc.) has paid off in 4 months.

• 11:55 minutes was the average time spent on Apartmenteka pages, which is 4 longer vs. ikea.ru.

• Total media reach was over 78.2mln impressions, including free media from the sources like Bloomberg.

• WARC has included Apartmenteka in the top 100 most efficient projects in the world for 2020.