‘Bengaluru by 2030 is expected to have a home furnishing potential of about ₹216 billion’ Premium

There were a few curious customers who were already exploring the store when The Hindu was invited to take a sneak peek at the store. Pooja Grover, Country Expansion Manager, IKEA India, finds a green couch in a living room set up where a child is playing next to a kids’ chair. “We are four stores old in the country, and for a while we did not expand further. But now we have some plans to expand the physical stores. What we are focusing on is accessibility and convenience. Our main name in this phase of growth is to be accessible to many people. We wanted to be in the East for a very long time,” she said, as she explained the vision behind the PaOP.

On Tuesday, April 29, there is feverish activity at the Essensai 067 Experience Centre on Whitefield-Hoskote Road. There is one day to go for Swedish home furnishings retailer IKEA to throw open its first ‘Plan and Order Point’ (PaOP) in India and the staff is busy adding finishing touches to the curated setups.

The 740 sqm space is nowhere comparable in size to the flagship store in Nagasandra, but serves the retailer’s aim to expand - both in format as well as geographically - to serve bustling East Bengaluru.

There were a few curious customers who were already exploring the store when The Hindu was invited to take a sneak peek at the store. Pooja Grover, Country Expansion Manager, IKEA India, finds a green couch in a living room set up where a child is playing next to a kids’ chair. “We are four stores old in the country, and for a while we did not expand further. But now we have some plans to expand the physical stores. What we are focusing on is accessibility and convenience. Our main name in this phase of growth is to be accessible to many people. We wanted to be in the East for a very long time,” she said, as she explained the vision behind the PaOP.

Spanning 740 sqm, the new format, according to IKEA, serves as a dedicated customer meeting point, bringing expert home design knowledge closer to customers with personalised consultations, flexible planning support, and seamless installation services.

The PaOP, Grover said, is comparable to a design planning studio in the local market. “It gives you a personalised service for your home planning needs. You have the option of using one of our home furnishing consultants. You also have the option of doing it yourself. After the planning, the orders are placed and then you have the option of taking it online or having it delivered to your home or you can have a pickup option from here or you can have a pickup option from Nagasandra,” she explained.

“In terms of size, of course, Nagasadra is the mother store at 40,000 sq. mt store, while this is 740 sq. mt. In terms of articles, the mother store has 7000 plus articles. Here, we have quite a lot of articles displayed and we have a curated range for pickup. You will anyway have access to the full range by digital means. It’s more like an omni channel approach what we’re trying to explode and move towards the next phase of growth,” she said.

On why Bengaluru was chosen to start the first such store, she said IKEA’s focus is on the six cities - Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi, Pune and Chennai. “Bengaluru by 2030 is expected to have a home furnishing potential of about 216 billion INR. It’s a huge growth market, along with Delhi. And it’s one of our priority markets, so we are exploring to have quite a few of stores in various formats here. Why east of Bengaluru? It’s the IT hub, and because of that, you have a lot of young professionals here who are well-travelled, diverse, and from all over the country. If you do a mapping of the residential hotspots, you can see there’s huge amounts of residential catchments being added in the east along Hosakote and Sarjapur and these areas,” she further said.