Ikea opened this Friday its first store in Barcelona city, located on Diagonal. With an area of more than 1,500 square meters divided into two floors, the new store presents a reduced version of the typical route that can be followed in the establishments of Badalona, L'Hospitalet de Llobregat and Sabadell.
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 one of the six collection points the chain has in Catalonia, if there are no supply problems. In addition to the product exhibition area, the store has a small catering area of 51 square meters, where single-dish meals and drinks will be offered for less than five euros. It will have tables inside and also outside, with a terrace with up to ten tables.
The new opening in the Catalan capital has involved an investment of 5 million euros and the hiring of about 60 employees. It is located at number 532 of Diagonal, between Aribau and Tuset, right in the center of the street considered the golden mile of furniture and decoration stores in the city in the section between Francesc Macià and Paseo de Gràcia, with the presence of the main brands in the sector, among which the Swedish one was missing. Likewise, the new store is located in a building owned by Colonial that has been recently remodeled and that houses, precisely, the corporate headquarters of the real estate group.
The Diagonal store is Ikea's first urban store in Barcelona, 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. It will not be the only urban store in the Catalan capital, with the forecast of investing five million euros more to open the second one in the Glòries shopping center at the end of summer.
Ikea had been testing its landing in the city with the Ikea Planning Studio that opened in March 2021 also on Diagonal, very close to the new establishment. In this case, it was a space more designed for planning than for browsing, heavily influenced by the context imposed by the pandemic. With only 540 square meters of surface area, it had no route or products for sale, only spaces dedicated to exhibition and assisted sale of kitchen and bedroom items. With the inauguration of the urban store, it closed this week, concentrating design and advisory services in the new premises. 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.
The furniture and decoration company is immersed in an expansion process in Catalonia, where it has 17 sales or order collection points and a global workforce of 1,780 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.
According to company sources, these are not expected to be centers of the dimensions of those in L'Hospitalet, Badalona and Sabadell, and the opening of more stores like the one on Diagonal and a type of store that is halfway between large establishments and city stores is on the table, 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 the second will open in Almería at the beginning of July. This expansion plan foreseen in Catalonia is also being executed in the rest of Spain, where it plans to invest 150 million euros and hire 1,500 workers in the next two years.