Our colleagues in the store loved the idea. This was early COVID times, and they saw it as a real touchless time-saver.

10+ million IKEA QR scans later, I am happy we walked across that street those years ago.

We loved to work with the stores.

So, when we had an idea, we would often first talk with our colleagues in the store, to simply check if it makes sense, and then bring it forward internally in our digital org.
Looking back, I believe this was seen as a bit radical. We broke the process. But for us, it was just a walk across the street to the store. As a senior leader, I took some heat for this breaking of protocol, but given the results, it was worth it.

As a wise furniture dealer once said:
“The fear of making mistakes is the root of bureaucracy and the enemy of development.”

One of the ideas was to create a simple QR-code solution.
I know! It sounds silly! But please keep reading 🙂

Let the customer scan the QR-code and get a list on our website of whatever they were looking at. There was obviously many uses cases. Our colleagues in the store loved the idea. This was early COVID times, and they saw it as a real touchless time-saver.

We would provide a portal behind single-sign-on to create codes, route codes, statistics per code, etc. Not a big deal from a tech point of view. But a lever for our colleagues!

Internally, we had some push back “No one uses QR codes and everyone knows it. We shouldnt do this. We are busy. It’s not in the roadmap” etc +. The normal stuff. 👔

So we did what we did best 😁
Created the solution over a few days, printed our own QR-code stickers, and “deployed” them in the store. Now we just had to wait. We sat and stared at the dashboard we had created. Suddenly, a blip…and one more…

It turns out people were scanning our homebrew codes! 🚀

10+ million IKEA QR scans later, I am happy we walked across that street those years ago.

Picture: Very early stage of the solution and one of the codes we “deployed”.
* This post is part of the Edge Engineering series this week. Check my profile for more.