A top IKEA executive has revealed the Swedish company is heading to New Zealand shores in the coming months.
Speaking to the Australian Financial Review (AFR) last week, Jan Gardberg, the head of IKEA Australia, said he is about to transition to a new role, handing the baton to Mirja Viinanen. Gardberg says she will lead the push into New Zealand.
"We don't have one single IKEA store there yet, we are leading that expansion from here," Gardberg was quoted by AFR as saying of New Zealand.
"We are on the way there in the next three to four months. We have already the locations, the strategy, who we are doing the deals with, and so on."
In 2019, the furniture company said the classic big-box store would be coming to Auckland in "the next few years" while an online service would become available before the company moved to the South Island.
"We’re really looking forward to bringing the full Ikea experience to New Zealand, working in partnership with the local community to make IKEA a part of Kiwis’ life at home, starting with Auckland," the company's global chief executive, Jesper Brodin, said in 2019.
In an update last year, IKEA said there were plans for three physical stores. A large store would be in Auckland, a planning studio in Wellington and a smaller store in Christchurch.
"While planning has been underway, we have also been getting to know more about life at home in New Zealand," said Gardberg at the time.
"Each year Ikea conducts Life at Home Research, the largest, most comprehensive and longest-running global investigation into topics relating to peoples' life at home."
In 2018 Ikea added New Zealand to this study.
