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IKEA’s first-ever festival provides tours of homes from around the world

Written by Tom Ryan

Source: IKEA.com/festival

IKEA last Thursday hosted its first-ever IKEA Festival, providing tours of the homes of artists, interior designers, DJs, chefs and regular customers around the world for 24 hours. Over 100 homes in more than 50 countries were showcased during the free festival. Attendees saw intimate concerts and performances from popular musicians and DJs in their homes and studios. Chefs participated in cooking challenges featuring healthy, planet-friendly and no-waste recipes from their own kitchens. Interior designers as well as regular customers provided home makeover inspiration by detailing how they crafted their own living spaces. Livestreams took attendees to IKEA locations, including a factory floor in Zbąszynek, Poland and its prototype shop in Älmhult, Sweden. IKEA stores in different markets held their own events, according to Advertising Age. In Canada, the retailer hosted limited capacity, interactive in-store activities such as creative spaces where visitors learned art techniques and workshop spaces where visitors learned about home organization and room planning pro-tips, along with how to extend the life of their IKEA products. Replays of sessions from the event are available online. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCOAEvJ2rPY[/embed] “Our first IKEA Festival will bring people together around life at home in a new way, both online and in our stores, and will be the beginning of a longer-term movement of real homes and real lives," said Olivia Ross Wilson, communications director, Ingka Group, the largest owner of IKEA stores, in a statement. In a recent column for Advertising Age, Lisa Hurst, EVP of marketing and strategy for the Chicago-based agency, Upshot, discussed how stores are being leveraged to support livestream shopping and the creation of social content. “The future is phygital and ‘‘phygi-social,’’ she wrote. “We have an unprecedented opportunity to reimagine physical stores as exciting destinations for experience, co-creation and other participatory forms of engagement. And as social and digital content play a larger and more influential role in brand building as well as sales, these destinations will play a concurrently larger role in the creation of that content, so now’s the time to consider how your brand can create its own ‘collab house’ style content environment.”

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