As Ikea's long-delayed Ballymun outlet prepares for its opening on July 27th, CATHERINE CLEARYtakes the grand tour and finds out about the company's ethos and its hopes for the Republic
FOR THE moment all is quiet. But in six months time these polished concrete floors will be thronged. People will slide open wardrobes to dream of a more organised life. Children will clamber on crisply made beds. Meatballs and strange Swedish desserts will be eaten. And then trolleys will be piled with stuff people never came for but can’t go home without.
All this lies ahead for the vast clean box that is Ikea Dublin, where manager Garry Deakin and his skeleton staff of 27 managers are preparing for the long-awaited opening.
It might look like every other company building in Europe but the Dublin Ikea is unusual. No other finished Ikea building has ever stood empty for as long. Thanks to one of its 30 planning conditions (known simply by Ikea staff as Condition Two) the store cannot open its doors until the Ballymun interchange on the M50 is finished. It is a carbon copy of the Belfast store, but it is built on stilts so that cars can park underneath.
Through these stilts the building is heated by ground-source heat pipes. Some 180 boreholes have been drilled 120m down into the earth and the warmed air is then pumped up into the box. A secondary furnace will burn damaged furniture, chipped for fuel to minimise the company’s landfill. A huge tank under the car park collects rainwater from the roof to feed the toilet cisterns with harvested rainwater.
Since November, staff (or co-workers, as the company calls them) have been arriving in the distinctive navy and yellow uniform for their day’s work. Marketing manager Lisa O’Brien says it has been something of a relief in winter to be able to don a coat to avoid the “when are ye open?” question asked by almost every passer-by.
LAST WEEK THAT question was finally answered when a date of Monday, July 27th, was announced. The hearts of Ikea fans thumped a little more quickly. Those who take the get-a-grip-it’s-just-cheap-furniture attitude were mystified that the opening date for a shop was headline news. Since Thursday the company has had almost 2,000 applications for the next tranche of 45 supervisor jobs.
This week The Irish Timesgot the first glimpse inside the blue box. As I arrive through the "co-worker" entrance, a lonely Klippan couch (all pieces of furniture have Swedish names) sits at the bottom of the stairs. The security team works behind a blond wood desk with white compartments. There are healthy potted plants and lime-yellow lampshades to finish off the clean look. The area has all been styled by an in-house design team. Everything comes from the catalogue. The stools and benches in the airy staff canteen were assembled with an Allen key and full set of picture-only instructions.
Elsewhere in the quiet vastness, all the furniture for the restaurant is lined up in what will become the floor where 55 “room sets” are laid out for people to wander around. Aside from office and restaurant furniture a few green moulded plastic chairs and a few red leather Klippans are the only other pieces of furniture in this gargantuan 31,000sq m furniture shop.
All this calm will begin to break in the coming months. In early summer an average of 10-12 40ft long-haul container lorries will pull up to the back door every day, seven days a week for four weeks. Their contents will be unpacked onto the waiting shelves in the enormous warehouse, Deakin explains.
He is dressed in the serviceable heavy navy cotton trousers, yellow short-sleeved shirt and navy tank top. His name badge has no title, so he looks like every other employee. He works in an open-plan office. There are no executive parking spaces or management lunchrooms. All of this is part of the egalitarian ethos of the company, which prides itself on bringing good design to “the many” by making it cheap. They achieve this by piling it high and making the customers load, transport and build it themselves.
Deakin is an unapologetic company man who is optimistic about the prospects for the new venture in recession-strapped Ireland. Later I read a version of something he has said in A Testament of a Furniture Dealer, the 1976 text written by Ikea's 83-year-old founder Ingvar Kamprad, the nine rules of which are relayed to every new employee. It is a soundbite about the effort it takes to design an affordable dining table as opposed to the relative ease of designing a €3,000 one.
No one has to swear allegiance to Kamprad’s nine commandments, he insists. And no, Ikea is not a cult, as excitable coverage sometimes suggests.
Has he met the Swedish billionaire who set up the company? (I and K are Kamprad’s initials and the E and A stand for the name of his farm and his home village.) “Many times. He’s a super guy. I met him twice last year. He’s a great character. He bear-hugs everyone he meets. He’s so humble. He’s ordinary and he’s inspirational to be around. He came to me in London and he was in the store’s loading bay at 6.30 in the morning talking to a driver who’d delivered some stock from Poland, asking if he’d had enough sleep or had a coffee.”
With the opening of the Belfast Ikea, tens of thousands of southern shoppers have already cut their Ikea teeth. At the weekend, Deakin counted 23 southern registrations out of 100 cars in Belfast. But for those who have not taken the trip, the shop could be a culture shock.
How does he respond to people who say Ikea makes the customer do too much work? Is it all about costs or is there some philosophical idea about a work ethic attached too? “We like this idea that the customer is involved from the start. You’re encouraged to pick up your pencil, your ruler, buying guide, yellow bag and trolley,” he says. Greeters will be employed at the Dublin shop to initiate new arrivals in the first months after opening. (A how-to-shop DVD introduced in Belfast was abandoned shortly after its introduction because no one had the patience to stand and watch it.)
“Customers would prefer the Argos scenario, where they sit and watch the TV and wait for their number to come up and go and collect their trolley, neatly stacked with all their goods,” he says. But that would make things more expensive. “You’re never going to please all the people all the time.”
The company has stuck stubbornly to the hard-work approach. “There is something about standing back when you’ve built it and you do get that sense of being part of bringing something to life,” he says.
IN THE COMING months, new staff will be trained through role-play to deal with aggravated customers, the red mist of finding a wrong bit when you get it home or an empty shelf in the warehouse where a final hinge should be.
Based on a market of 1.38 million homes in the greater Dublin and commuter county areas, the company is expecting a €100 million turnover in its first year. “We will have 2.7 million people through our door, and even if 1 per cent of those people are unhappy there’s a lot of people,” says Deakin.
Will prices be higher than Belfast? “It’s going to happen so long as the pound remains artificially low. We are a Swedish company is opening in yet another country. We are not a bolt-on to the UK. We will price in euro, purchase in euro. But there will be times when people in the North will shop in the South and people in the South will shop in the North.
“If the customer is saying €1 buys you £1 then I can’t see how they’re not going to say it’s more expensive.”
Ikea Dublin will have to work with a higher VAT rate and probably higher wage costs, Deakin says. The company hasn’t set an hourly rate with Ibec yet. “But average high street employees get €10 an hour. In Belfast today Ikea pay £5.84 an hour so you don’t have parity.” Prices are likely to be 10-15 per cent higher in Dublin than in Belfast if sterling stays close to parity with the euro.
“If you wanted to buy a kitchen today with the pound on its knees you might see it as better value to drive. A lot depends on what value you put on your time.”
