IKEA opens India's first Small-Format City store in Mumbai

Swedish furniture giant IKEA has opened India's first city store in Mumbai. The store, located at Kamala Mills, Worli, spans 80,000 square feet across three floors. This is IKEA's third store in India after it opened two large-format stores in Hyderabad in August 2018 and Navi Mumbai December last year.

The company has an online presence across Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Surat, Ahmedabad and Vadodara. This is IKEA's first city store format, i.e. a store that is smaller than its flagship larger stores.

The idea, IKEA says is to make IKEA stores more accessible to people in large cities like Mumbai by opening smaller stores within smaller spaces available within an urban space. The city store format allows IKEA to open smaller stores within smaller spaces available within urban space and makes it more convenient for the many customers to experience the IKEA offer, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.

The Mumbai city store will offer the entire IKEA range (8,000-9,000 products) facilitated by a well-integrated digital and physical shopping experience. While 2,200 articles will be available for immediate takeaway. Focused mainly on home furnishing, accessories, textiles & others smaller items, customers can buy the rest of the range through the help of sales personnel in the stores and digitally and have them delivered at home.

The company, however, will allow only customers with a vaccine certificate, with over 14-day lapse after the second dose, to enter the store for shopping, according to the statement.

With more city store formats and online expansion planned in India, IKEA had said it is well on track to exceed the investment commitment of Rs 10,500 crore it made for India in December 2020.

With a planned investment of Rs 6,000 crore by 2030, IKEA aims to meet 25 million people in Maharashtra, providing over 4,000 jobs, of which 50 percent will be for women.