Ikea opens a new urban store in the Glòries shopping center

Shortly after the opening of its first urban store in Barcelona, on Avenida Diagonal, Ikea has inaugurated the second establishment of these characteristics in the city. In this case, it is located in the Glòries shopping center and has more than 1,600 square meters of surface area on a single floor.

The new Glòries store presents a reduced version of the typical route that can be followed in the establishments of Badalona, L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, and Sabadell. The opening has involved an investment of almost 5 million euros and the hiring of 60 workers.

It has about 3,000 products on display and only a thousand are for direct sale, ranging from sheets, bedding, and stuffed animals, to lamps, plates, and kitchen utensils. The rest, such as wardrobes and beds, can be ordered in the same store and picked up 24 hours later at the chain's collection points in Catalonia, if there are no supply problems. 350 meters from the Glòries store, there is one of these collection points.

In addition to the product exhibition area, the store has a small restaurant area. There you can order the chain's typical dishes, such as its meatballs, but also local dishes like patatas bravas.

The furniture and decoration company is immersed in an expansion process in Catalonia, where it has 18 sales or order collection points and a global workforce of almost 2,000 employees. Ikea plans to open 12 new stores in the province of Barcelona by 2025, with an investment of 40 million euros and the hiring of 300 employees.

They are not expected to be centers of the dimensions of those in L'Hospitalet, Badalona, and Sabadell, and the opening of more stores like those on Diagonal and Glòries is on the table, as well as a type of store that is halfway between large establishments and city stores, with surfaces that can be 7,500 square meters and workforces of 150 employees. They are known as XS stores and have already been tested in Torrejón (Madrid) and Almería. This expansion plan foreseen in Catalonia is also being executed in the rest of Spain, where the company plans to invest 150 million euros and hire 1,500 workers in the next two years.

New format

The urban stores in Diagonal and Glòries arrive after successfully testing the same format in Madrid, on Goya street, which was the first store of these characteristics that the Swedish brand has had worldwide. The company seeks with these openings to get closer to its customers, avoiding them having to travel to large establishments located in other cities and offering them a concentrated selection of the more than 9,000 references that can be found in Badalona, L'Hospitalet, and Sabadell.

Ikea had been testing its landing in Barcelona with the Ikea Planning Studio that opened in March 2021 on Diagonal. In this case, it was a space more designed for planning than for browsing, very influenced by the context imposed by the pandemic. With only 540 square meters of surface, it had no route or products for sale, only spaces dedicated to exhibition and assisted sale of kitchen and bedroom items. With the opening of the chain's first urban store in the city, also on Diagonal, this Ikea Planning Studio closed. Although this format has not taken hold in the Catalan capital, the company maintains it in other Catalan cities, such as Tarragona, Girona, Lleida, and Sant Pere de Ribes.