Today I learned about Mykea, a ‘small creative company with a big idea‘. The company’s service is simple and brilliant: MyKea lets you customize IKEA furniture and sell your designs online. This new Dutch start-up combines personalization, innovation, crowdsourcing and customer engagement. Why didn’t IKEA come up with this idea?
In an attempt to free the world of naked furniture, Mykea offers a store and a platform through which you can buy, upload and sell design covers to customize IKEA furniture. Mykea makes clever use of the worldwide popularity of IKEA furniture, and the growing trend of personalizing products and services. This idea is clever in its own right. By opening up its store to upload and sell your own designs though, Mykea positions itself as an independent community-driven design platform for IKEA. Now this is a brilliant idea.
Why? Because this idea allows all parties to focus on their core strengths, because it uses the creativity of the crowd, and because (as a result of this) it creates and strengthens customer engagement. IKEA builds and ships furniture, customers buy the furniture, and Mykea’s community (may be the same customers) pimp the furniture. This is a nice example of indirect customer engagement and value co-creation: Mykea targets IKEA customers (and other creative minds) to redesign the looks of IKEA furniture and sell their designs.
This whole story makes me wonder: Why didn’t IKEA come up with this idea? Don’t get me wrong, I applaud the creativity of the people behind Mykea, and I hope they will succeed, but this seems like an excellent opportunity for value co-creation. Why didn’t IKEA think of stimulating their own customers to redesign their products, and keeping the ideas coming by rewarding their customers every time their designs are resold? Sounds like a powerful app store idea to me! Combined with the worldwide popularity of the IKEA brand, this sounds like a potential success story.
Come to think of it, there aren’t too many companies that allow individual customers to redesign their unique products and services and resell these designs through a company platform, are there? I don’t talk about generic products like mugs, T-shirts and the like, but about (relatively) specific products and services. Apple’s app store comes closest to me, but I can’t think of many other companies in other businesses that offer similar platforms. This seems strange to me, because I think it would be a great way to engage customer communities.
What do you think? Do you know of many organizations that allow individual customers to redesign their unique products and services and resell these designs through a company platform? If so, I would like to hear about them. If not, why do you think companies don’t take this opportunity to engage their customer community?
Source: Thank you Laurence Buchanan and Springwise for sharing Mykea‘s story with us. And thanks Mark Tamis for the excellent feedback in the preparatory stage of this post.
Hi Christophe,
Indeed there are many unexplored opportunities ripe for the picking. You could apply the same principle as described above to the Car Tuning scene – imagine creating and uploading custom decals for your particular model car.
In general, manufacturers neglect the after-market completely, and they don’t take into account the Consumer Decision Journey as described by McKinsey (https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/The_consumer_decision_journey_2373) where the post-purchase behaviour influences the buying decision in the next iteration.
The approach described above moves the logic from value-in-exchange to value-in-use – with an opportunity for third parties to act as facilitators. As such I am not for the manufacturers to offer such after-market services as in most cases it could distract them from delivering on their core product promise, but I do believe they could be involved in this part of the cycle by actively stimulating these third-party initiatives, or by providing a platform to make it easier for customers to go out and find product extensions they can customize.
Cheers!
Mark
Hi Mark,
You make a valid point: organizations should focus on their core business and get the basics right first before expanding their business model, and before trying to wow their customers.
That being said, why wouldn’t companies be able to add after-purchase services to their core business without compromising their traditional business model? I think the two can go hand in hand; and the emerging synergy may offer new opportunities for customer-centric design. If organizations focus on developing and delivering products and services with the end in mind (where the end is a finished product or service that meets the expectations, but that is ready to be further customized by the customer community), it will only increase the need for customer-centered thinking in the R&D process. It will force companies to think with their customers (or: their development partners) in mind, and it may help them to improve their products with comments, tips and lessons learned from the community.
But luckily business is not black and white, and I think that your solution is a very workable compromise. Good suggestion, Mark. Thanks for sharing this with us!
Christophe.
You asked about companies that allow customers to modify their existing products, and IKEA is the only one I know of that doesn’t interfere with companies that do that. I want to share with you another way to customize furniture from IKEA or really, any other furniture or smooth surfaced furniture or home decor. Check out GLOS:
http://www.glosdesign.com or http://www.glosover.com
GLOS is a US company that makes temporary, removable, repositionable (during application) sticker like panels for customizing all kinds of things. They have tons of designs, including a Pattern Wizard app that allows customers to modify colors and scale on hundreds of patterns. They also offer custom work, which would include photos, etc.
I believe customization of mass produced furniture is brilliant. The ability to change your mind is the best part. When you decide to redecorate, you can peel the GLOS right off without leaving behind any sticky mess, and put on another GLOS pattern to match your new look. The Billie bookcase could be “new” over and over again.
Lolly