Designers Philippe Simon and Pillard Rosetti customized their IKEA kitchen island by covering it with over 20,000 LEGO pieces.

IKEA and WWF are galvanizing Swedish school kids in the ages 6-9 to collect the aluminum shells from tea lights.

Vizeum Norway are pitching for the Ikea account, and they’ve decided to use crowdsourcing to answer the brief, which requires coming up with an idea for a social media platform for the iconic brand.

Anybody who visits IKEA on a weekend in China will be sure to find the familiar scene of customers napping on the couches and beds. And if you stop by the popular IKEA cafeteria, you almost certainly will have to wait around before a table opens up. Following up on our previous coverage, we now take a deeper look at Chinese consumers reaction to IKEA.
Opening their first store ten years ago, IKEA has become a popular place for the rising middle class to spend their freetime, but they are not necessarily buying the furniture. In our experience, Chinese customers are [...]

The LA Times has published an interesting gallery of images showing Beijing consumers using their local IKEA store as a space to relax and socialize. Beyond shopping, the store has become a destination for Saturday afternoon family outings, naps, and photo shoots.
Only with China’s recent economic growth have branded retail experiences become more common. For most Chinese the concept is still fairly foreign, making visiting these locations a form of entertainment.
[via LA Times]

Google
Experiment rapidly, embrace failure.
Apple
Every aspect of your brand should be as good as the product.
Zipcar
Stop selling products, start selling services.
GOOD Magazine
Set the agenda and let your customers spread the conversation.
Amazon
Identify parts of our business that could be offered as additional services.
Facebook
Create the playground and let your customers define your offering.
Virgin
Think big , think small. Amaze customers with your audacity, please them with your attention to detail and customer service.
Twitter
Stay flexible, allow your audience to dictate how your services or products are used.
IKEA
Take a wider view of the shopping experience, making each step along the path to purchase simpler and, more [...]

Beyond IKEA’s continued allegiance to its core premise of offering affordable, well-designed furniture and household goods, they have maintained creative efforts to evolve their marketing and peripheral services around this central hub.
Useful services such as their bike-sharing program in Denmark, car sharing in France and their free water taxi in New York offer innovative ways to help their customers more easily access their stores. By making it as easy as possible to buy their products, IKEA closes the gap between intent and purchasing.
Lesson for Business:
Take a wider view of the shopping experience, making each step along the path to purchase [...]

There seems to be no stopping Ikea, everybody’s favorite accessible furniture brand. Bedroom Secrets wasn’t too long ago, and they’ve already come up with Come Into The Closet, where you can customize your music as you go through the site, either by uploading your own tracks or selecting from a list of songs already provided. You can then use the keys on your keyboard to make the characters on the screen move at a pace you like, simultaneously creating drum sounds. If you have a microphone, you can even clap your hands or make other sounds that can induce the [...]

In a recent interview with Fast Company, Patagonia founder, Yvon Chouinard offers his thoughts on running an environmentally conscious business and what is on his mind – the “myth of sustainability”, an ideal he sees as a path rather than [...]

Ikea has become known for innovative digital campaigns: Open Kitchen was one of their most recent successes, a site that allowed users to upload images of their kitchens with the chance to win back the cost of their Ikea kitchen. Their latest one is Bedroom Secrets, where apart from winning a similar prize for uploading pictures of their bedrooms, users can look into the bedrooms of three characters: Lonne, Sven and Manette, live. Reminds us of Nokia’s Somebody Else’s Phone campaign, as well as Diesel’s hijacking campaign from not too long ago, though user-generated content is something the other two [...]

If simply getting customers in the door is the key to creating a successful business, then IKEA just might have developed the winning formula. The NY Daily News visits the Swedish retailer at their location in Red Hook, Brooklyn to examine the growing trend among people who are visiting the store several times a week to take advantage of the free daycare. The service will watch children between 36 and 50 inches in height for 45 minutes on weekdays and 30 minutes on weekends, providing a much needed respite for overworked parents and guardians – enough time to catch a break, [...]

Fast Company recently reported today that the mysterious cloth draped car called the ‘Ikea Leko’ is actually a car sharing program in conjunction with Comuto, the French ride-sharing company behind Covoiturage.fr, for 26 IKEA locations in France. The service will be similar to the Ikea/zipcar program in the US pictured above.
While we’re bummed that the reveal won’t be either a real car or a clever April fools internet hoax, it is nice to see the retailer expanding this service to more locations.
[photo via positive fanatics]

Here are PSFK’s top five articles from Mar. 23 – Mar. 29, 2009.  Results are based on Google Analytics and in order of overall page views.
Stella McCartney Boot-Tights – Orli Sharaby
Nokia Almighty Headsets – Piers Fawkes
Swedish Magazine is Published as a Tattoo – Dan Gould
IKEA to Reveal Concept Car – Dave Pinter
Wieden Kennedy’s Nokia Competition Shows That Crowdsourcing can Suck For the Crowd – Piers Fawkes

Jalopnik found a new mini site Ikea has launched to showcase the reveal of a ‘concept car’. The wrapped vehicle is called Leko. Jalopnik translated some of the French on the intro page which says the concept car is a modular design which can operate as a coupe or as a convertible, and has the full backing of the World Wildlife Fund France. Rumor is that the car will be sold flat-packed and assembled with only an allen wrench. The site counts down to a few moments before April 1st.

In today’s dynamic media landscape, people are living their lives at the speed of real time. News is expected to be up to the second, friends keep up with each others’ lives online, step by step and hour by hour, and the latest and greatest can change every time you “refresh the page.” It has created a culture where there is a lot of cache in knowing and being part of what’s current, and anything slightly out-of-date can feel awkwardly out of synch. And it’s not just newsrooms and networking sites that need to keep up; it’s an expectation that [...]