Ikea, the world’s leading home furnishings retailer, is deploying a specifically-tailored advertising campaign to promote the June 18 grand opening of IKEA Brooklyn, the Swedish company’s first store and restaurant destination in New York City.
New York City structures have been built with hundreds of IKEA-branded flat-pack boxes, while iconic locations will be sites of pop-up IKEA room settings and strategic communications.
Landmark Sculptures
IKEA creative partner, Deutsch NY, worked with artist and architect John Hobbs to create gigantic sculptures of NYC landmarks (some more than 96 feet long and 21 feet tall) out of more than 1,000 cardboard boxes, which were then used in television, print and out-of-home executions.
Many images/references will be teased prior to launch and “revealed” leading up to the store’s opening. For example, selected bus shelters will showcase ads depicting IKEA room settings, covered with a cardboard teaser featuring these “assembled” landmarks: Brooklyn Bridge, Brooklyn water towers, Empire State Building with Manhattan skyline, all of which will be displayed on-site at IKEA Brooklyn beginning June 18.
Pop-up Room Settings
Deutsch worked with TH Outdoor to create four 20’ x 20’ pop-up room settings — or living room-sized boxes with complete interiors furnished with IKEA furniture such as sofas, tables and chair, and accessories such as lamps, rugs and prints. Inside, the public can experience IKEA products.
Leading up to IKEA Brooklyn’s grand opening, these life-sized rooms can be found at Union Square in Manhattan and in Brooklyn at Borough Hall Plaza, the Brooklyn Public Library (June 13) and Cadman Plaza (June 15).
Additional Branded Elements
The 346,000-square-foot IKEA Brooklyn will be the fourth IKEA store in the New York-New Jersey area, 35th in the U.S., and is located on 22 acres along the Erie Basin waterfront in Red Hook, south of the BQE/Gowanus Expressway and southeast of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.
The store — with views of lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty — will employ more than 500 coworkers and will feature 10,000 exclusively-designed items, a 450-seat IKEA Restaurant, 6.5 acres of waterfront esplanade, a supervised children’s play area, and approximately 1,400 parking spaces.
For more about IKEA, go to www.ikea-usa.com.
