Hyderabad: Swedish home furnishing retailer IKEA opened a ‘Hej Home’ experience centre on Wednesday in Hyderabad, where it will launch its first store in India next year.
The centre will give visitors an idea of the kind of products the store, which will open for business in the spring of 2018, will offer.
IKEA country marketing manager Ulf Smedberg said the global retailer had also acquired land in Bengaluru and Gurgaon to establish stores in the coming months.
The upcoming Hyderabad store is being set up on an area of 400,000 square feet area in the Hi-tech city area, and will have over 7,000 products on display, said John Achillea, store manager, IKEA Hyderabad. “We’re still recruiting and the entry level salary is from Rs16,000 a month. We’re also training young women to work in retail,” he said.
“We have been sourcing (materials) from India from the last 30 years, and it is our biggest operation. For the Hyderabad store, we have local entrepreneurs who will help us with assembling and servicing etc.,” Smedberg told journalists.
The company looked at over 500 homes in India, and over 100 in the city, of different compositions with regard to income, family size, ete before finalizing on products.
The store will also have competitive prices, as 1,000 products (out of over 7,000 plus) have been priced under Rs2,000. Christian Kampe, sales manager, IKEA India, said that this was done keeping in mind even “thin wallets”. He added that Ikea is also looking to source materials locally and trying to find more local partners as well.
On pricing, Smedberg also said that the range of products have been categorized under “functions” and “style groups”. “Under ‘functions’, we have low-priced, medium and upper-medium prices. We are not looking at high-end, because it is very exclusive, and not our philosophy,” said the county marketing manager.
