IKEA want to inspire and enable people to live a more sustainable life at home. And when someone buy a new IKEA sofa, we know that the old one is likely to end up on the junk yard even if it´s still good. We don´t like to see old furniture go to waste, even if we like people to buy our furniture. We wanted to raise sustainability awareness, through targeting a narrow group; people about to buy new furniture. So at the launch of the new catalogue, we decided to help our customers sell their old furniture in national media.

We asked customers about to buy new IKEA-furniture: "Can we help you sell your old furniture?". We then chose approx. 50 real people for the campaign, and started collecting their old furniture. Then we produced print ads, TVC spots and banners for these old products featuring the sellers phone numbers.

Selling single pieces of old furniture in national media, and sharing the advertising space with our customers, sends a powerful message of sustainability. We showed that we mean business in finding new homes for old furniture, by putting them before our own. At the same time we had a 40% increase in our sales of the new products online. Sales in stores even increased by 5.5%. All ads featured the new IKEA-catalogue as pack-shot, and the number of downloaded apps increased from 115,000 to 200,000+. The campaign has an all-time high score, on liking and awareness, compared to all previous IKEA-campaigns worldwide.

For 8 weeks we shared all of IKEA´s advertising space with our customers. The campaign was kicked off immediately after the annual catalogue-launch, containing hundreds of new IKEA products. Step 1 was banner ads containing the names of the sellers of the second-hand products, and their actual phone numbers, so buyers could contact them directly. Step 2 was the TVC´s, aired in prime time on national television. And at the same time we ran a huge outdoor campaign in the capitol, which has two major warehouses.

Halfway into the campaign we turned IKEA´s Facebook page into a digital flea market where people could sell their old products every sunday, giving the campaign a new boost in social media.