IKEA pop-up store to open in Prague centre

Swedish furniture giant IKEA will open a new store in the very centre of Prague this summer, the daily e15 reported on Thursday. A temporary pop-up store selling living rooms will be located on Wenceslas Square in a former Česká spořitelna building. The costs of the initiative are expected to reach 15 million crowns.

IKEA pop-up store will be located on Wenceslas Square in a former Česká spořitelna building, photo: CTK

The main aim of the pop-up store is to reach out to new customers, since the company’s regular stores are located on the outskirts of Prague and may be difficult to reach for people who don’t have a car.

“A pop-up store is not a large store and it will only take up around one thousand square metres. It will only be selling some segments of our products, in this case living rooms,” IKEA’s pop-up store project manager Petr Tichý told the daily e15.

The studio will also feature a café and will employ around 30 people.

IKEA expects around 1,000 customers to visit their studio each day, which is about one tenth of the visitor numbers in the brand’s regular stores.

“People have more money but less time today. This is why we want to get closer to them and occupy sites in city centres,” Marek Feltl, general director of IKEA Czech Republic told the daily.

Last year, IKEA Czech Republic posted a turnover of 9.7 billion crowns, which is a four percent increase on the previous year.

Customers spend on average 1,638 crowns during every visit to the store. Some 96 percent of transactions happened in the brick and mortar stores and four percent via the company’s e-shop, which was launched in last year.

IKEA opened its first pop-up store last summer in Stockholm. Since then, the Swedish retailer has opened around a dozen of pop-up stores around the world. The Swedish chain currently has four stores around the Czech Republic, two of them in the capital and one each in Brno and Ostrava.