Peer-to-peer home improvement marketplace.

Extending IKEA beyond furniture

IKEA's New Business Platform is an internal startup unit within Ingka Group, tasked with expanding the brand into adjacent markets across Europe. The ambition was clear: if you've just bought a flat-pack wardrobe, you probably need someone to help you put it up. And IKEA wanted to be the one to connect you.

IKEA Home Services is the result — a peer-to-peer marketplace connecting homeowners with vetted, reviewed professionals across more than 50 home improvement and assembly categories. It launched in Madrid in September 2024, reached Barcelona a year later, and expanded to seven Spanish regions by May 2026 — including renovation services added in March 2026.

Trust, consistency, and speed

Marketplace products live or die on trust. Homeowners need to trust the professionals they're letting into their homes. Professionals need to trust that the platform is worth their time. And IKEA needs the product to feel like IKEA — considered, reliable, without friction.

The additional complexity: we were building a new product inside a very large, brand-sensitive organisation, working with multiple stakeholders across product, service design, engineering, content, and the in-store IKEA network. Decisions had to be made at pace, but they had to hold up to scrutiny. The brief was never fully stable.

Embedded, end-to-end

I work as a Senior Product Designer embedded full-time within the IKEA New Business Platform team. That means I'm not consulting from the outside — I'm inside the product team, alongside product owners, service designers, engineers, content designers, and business developers.

My work spans user flows, interaction design, high-fidelity prototyping, in-store user research sessions at IKEA locations, accessibility auditing (WCAG compliance), and design handoff. I contribute to product decisions, not just design delivery.

Research first, iteration always

We ran user research sessions inside IKEA stores — recruiting participants on-site and testing flows in context, with the app running on real devices. This gave us faster signal than remote testing and was consistent with the product's natural discovery channel.

The design process was iterative by necessity. A marketplace has two distinct user types — homeowners and service professionals — each with different mental models and success criteria. We mapped flows for both sides separately before working on the points of intersection: booking, confirmation, dispute resolution, and review mechanics.

Accessibility was treated as a requirement from day one, not an audit at the end. The product had to meet IKEA's own accessibility standards alongside WCAG AA, across iOS and Android.

Strong adoption from launch

These are published figures from Ingka Group. The product launched in Madrid in September 2024 and has since expanded to seven Spanish regions as of May 2026, with continued growth in progress.

What building inside a large brand teaches you

Working embedded within IKEA's team has reinforced something I've come to believe: the design work is rarely the hardest part. The hardest part is maintaining a coherent design direction while stakeholder priorities shift, the roadmap changes, and team members rotate. The answer isn't to fight the instability — it's to build systems that absorb it.

The experience also sharpened my thinking on what "user trust" actually requires in a marketplace: it's not just visual polish or smooth onboarding. It's the cumulative result of dozens of small decisions — how you present professional credentials, how you handle a booking that goes wrong, how you phrase a review prompt. These are all design decisions, whether or not they're treated as such.