By Yiler Huang

In Ikea, the store is arranged like a maze, where the customers have to pass through the whole store in order to leave. There are multiple small areas with arrangements of their products designed to look like real rooms. This is so that the customer can go from one sample room to another, imagining themselves with the products in the spaces in their homes.

The store’s lighting is consistent in all the areas except for the sample rooms. Ikea’s use of lighting in Ikea is designed to make their products look bright and neat through the use of whiter toned light. However, they use warmer tones in some sample rooms, particularly in those showcasing bedrooms, to make it easier for customers to imagine what the products will look like in their homes.

Ikea uses the color yellow, blue, and white as their primary color to establish brand awareness. This is so that people associate the colors with the brand. The use of the three colors can be seen throughout the store. Blue and yellow are colors that are easy to spot in a white background, so they are used as colors for signs in the store to guide people. They use red, an even more eye-catching color, in order to promote products that are on sale. The products that they sell usually have neutral colors like black, gray, white etc. this is because these colors are easy to mix and match with most other colors.

The sample rooms seemed to be arranged to fit a theme or style. This is so that customers can easily find products that match their taste. Because we live in Taiwan, many arrangements and placements of items seemed to be leaning towards smaller spaces. They also group products within the same category together so customers have more choices when comparing and choosing among similar products.