IKEA‑native resale, at European scale.

Circular commerce built on IKEA's own catalogue

IKEA's sustainability commitments require more than recycling materials — they require rethinking the lifetime of the product. A second-hand marketplace solves that problem commercially: it keeps IKEA products in circulation, creates value for sellers, and lowers the barrier to buying IKEA for price-conscious buyers.

What makes this product structurally interesting is its data backbone. Because IKEA's product catalogue is exhaustive and machine-readable, listings don't need manual product descriptions — the platform can retrieve dimensions, materials, assembly instructions, and compatibility data automatically from the IKEA database. This dramatically reduces listing friction and increases trust.

Scaling a pilot across markets

The product launched as a pilot in Madrid and Oslo in August 2024, running in parallel with IKEA Home Services on the same team. As the pilots proved themselves, the pressure shifted: from getting the product to work in one market to making it work across five — with different payment systems, different consumer protection laws, and different levels of second-hand market maturity.

This meant the design work had to be modular. Assumptions valid in Spain couldn't be hardcoded into components that would serve Norway or Portugal. Localisation wasn't an afterthought — it was a structural constraint from the beginning of the expansion phase.

Product design across the full lifecycle

I contribute to the Second-hand Marketplace alongside my work on IKEA Home Services — both products operate within the same IKEA New Business Platform team. My role spans product design, cross-functional collaboration, and contribution to the shared design operations framework that supports both products.

As the platform has matured and scaled, the nature of the work has shifted from defining new flows to refining and extending a system that needs to remain coherent across markets and team changes.

Modular by design

Working on two marketplace products simultaneously has a useful side effect: patterns that work in one tend to inform the other, and design debt in one becomes visible faster when you're maintaining consistency across both. The listing creation flow, the trust and safety messaging, the review architecture — these were developed with cross-product consistency in mind.

The IKEA catalogue integration required close collaboration with engineering to define the data contract between the catalogue and the UI. What fields were always available? What fields were optional or inconsistently populated? The answers shaped the information hierarchy of every listing page.

Live in five markets, scaling further

The platform launched as a pilot in Madrid and Oslo in August 2024. Through 2025 it expanded to Spain, Norway, Portugal, and Poland. Sweden joined in January 2026, bringing the total to five active markets. Ingka Group has committed to continuing EU-wide expansion, with a target of approximately 170,000 listings in 2026. Specific commercial performance figures are not published publicly at this time.