Ikea UK chief: 'We have to ask what the role of the store is now'

Ikea lifer Gillian Drakeford talks about how the home-furnishings giant has adapted to different markets, and why ‘simple little products’ are becoming more important in the UK.

“I’m an Ikea lifer,” says Gillian Drakeford, UK chief executive of the Scandinavian home furnishings giant. Drakeford, who hails from Kendal in Cumbria, spent three years in retail before joining the brand. Aged 21, she joined its first UK store in Warrington in 1987.

What Drakeford didn’t expect from her Ikea career, as a young salesperson serving customers in the market hall (the food and eating area), was that she would spend 15 years in the Far East. She worked with franchisees in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and spent 11 years in mainland China – key markets in Ikea’s 28 country reach.

It showed her how the brand needed to adapt to multifarious modes of living. On the one hand, there was the UK’s long-standing ideal of homeownership and large spaces to entertain friends and family.
On the other, the street-food socialising of Hong Kong renters who, with small living spaces, were far less likely to host an event at home.

“To work in a market where people live in tiny spaces, multifunctional furniture takes on a whole new meaning,” she explains. “It’s also a culture where people don't necessarily entertain in their homes. What I learnt was the importance of understanding how people live – going into their homes and seeing how they use their space.”

Showing people how to use products is key to Drakeford’s thinking about the customer relationship with the brand – and helps her to reshape Ikea’s in-store experience. One of the products that she illustrates this with is the 365+ pot, commonly used for cooking pasta in mainland Europe and steaming dumplings in Asia. “You have to show people the application before they realise that it’s right for them,”
she says.

These “simple little products” are becoming more important for the UK market, as the trend towards renting, rather than owning, one’s home continues in major cities. It means fewer large wardrobes and more remote control holders, she explains.

Drakeford’s greatest challenge is to turn Ikea into an omni-channel retailer in the UK – the global pilot country, chosen because it’s such a competitive home furnishing market. This "try-it-and-see" method is used throughout the company internationally. “There’s no concept room somewhere; we trial things in countries and then roll them out,” she adds.

Ikea UK is planning to expand the number of branches it has. It recently opened a new store in Reading, Sheffield’s Ikea is due to open in July this year, and further plans for new stores in Exeter and Greenwich are afoot. “There’s still a future in the store,” says Drakeford. “I still think it’s really important, but it’s not enough. We need to get ourselves closer to the customer.”

These new physical stores will be different in design – focusing on the finish of products and illustrating how they can complement each other, rather than the acres of warehouse-like rooms customers currently see in-store.

“We have to ask what the role of the store is now? What makes people get in the car and drive to a store? What do they want when they get there?” she says. "It’s not just [about] the product, but the solution around it: textiles, different bolt-ons and so on – like a build-your-own-bed idea.”

Being able to browse online and follow it up with a face-to-face conversation with an Ikea expert is key to this omni-channel approach. “People want human interaction in store. It’s what we’ve always done, but it’s enhanced by technology and expertise,” says Drakeford.

Shifting methods of working in such major ways – redesigning stores, for example, and rethinking workers’ roles – requires a very particular kind of leadership, Drakeford believes. 

She focuses on trying to inspire others, but that's only possible if employees are receptive in the first place. Key to a responsive team is that they’re happy in their roles and have good working conditions, fair schedules and autonomy.

That’s the thinking behind Ikea’s adoption of the living wage in 2015, and the remodelling of schedules so that workers get rotas earlier (allowing them to plan ahead) and receive at least one weekend off in four. The latter is something that Drakeford championed, having been a mother who spent many years working weekends.

"The two things that I focus on are: where are we at with the customer experience and with our co-workers? What do they need in order to make the experience better for the customer? You can have great strategies and great advertising, but if people aren’t getting a great experience in store [because the workers are unhappy], it won’t work,” she says.

For Drakeford, the metric that determines if a company is well-run is if everyone in the business feels empowered. The days of having a small group of smart people going into a room, deciding what should happen, then dictating that to workers are over. “I don’t want an oil tanker; I want a fleet of lots of small boats all moving in the same direction,”she explains.

“It’s lots of different perspectives that lead to the right answers. If, say, we wanted to rethink queuing, we would involve the frontline cashiers, a store manager and the co-worker on the sales desk. We ask for volunteers and people are very responsive. We’re clear when people join: you have to lead yourself.”

There isn’t a magic wand by which change can be instantly enacted across the roughly 10,000-strong Ikea workforce. But it adds
pace to new ways of working, Drakeford adds. You still have to draw on your resilience (“you’ve got to have that quality as a chief executive,” she says) – keep pushing, keep talking and try again.

Her leadership mantra? “Okay, that didn’t work. We go again.”