IKEA to open new design studio for kitchens and bathrooms in Prague

This furniture store IKEA plans to open its first design studio in the region of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary in Prague. It will focus on planning kitchens, storage spaces and bathrooms. There will also be more dispensing points; the next three will open in the regions this year.

According to Aktualne, IKEA has not yet announced the date of the opening of the planning studio or a specific location, the company's representatives stated at a press conference on Tuesday with details being published before the summer.

IKEA Business Manager Federica Barberis said that it could be in a shopping center or on a busy street. According to her, it will be the first projection studio, with many planned across the region.

There was already an IKEA in the center of Prague, where customers could plan a kitchen or pick up a small purchase, operated on Wenceslas Square for about a year, until August 2019. Representatives of the company subsequently stated that the so-called IKEA Point was only a temporary project designed to test a similar operation.

In the past financial year, which lasted from September 2019 to last August, IKEA recorded double sales on the Internet year-on-year. Employees processed up to 30,000 orders a week, said Mounia El Hilali, the company's director for the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia.

The company wants to focus on improving online shopping in the near future. It will invest in IT systems and logistics capacities. Last year, it opened three dispensing points in the regions, and this year three more will be added to them, in the Pilsen, Karlovy Vary and Ústí nad Labem regions.

One of the new services this year is a guaranteed purchase of used children's furniture. Club members who no longer need the piece of furniture will be able to sell it back to IKEA for a predetermined price. For example, if the furniture is sold within one year of its purchase, the customer will receive approximately 60 percent of the original price.