Ikea to open smaller outlets in French towns
Swedish furniture company aims to reach more people
The ambition is to eventually have a store within 15 minutes of most people in the country
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Swedish flat-pack furniture giant Ikea is expanding its presence in France by opening a series of smaller shops in mid-sized towns.
The outlets will display approximately 1,800 items and assure delivery of any others that are listed in its catalogue but not available in-store.
Ikea’s head of French operations, Johan Laurell, told Les Echos, France’s main financial newspaper, that the ambition is to eventually have a store within 15 minutes of most people in the country.
The new format stores will be modular, and are designed to be installed and operational quickly in existing buildings.
The largest of these outlets will have a sales surface of around 3,000m².
Limoges (Haute-Vienne) and Le Mans (Sarthe) will be home to the first two “before the summer”, but no specific figures or timelines have been confirmed for others.
The firm already has 36 large shops in the country. Its first French store opened in the Paris suburbs in 1981, and France has since become its third-largest foreign market after Germany and the United States.
All of the large stores are installed on commercial estates on the outskirts of cities, boasting sales surfaces of up to 30,000m². Arrows marked on the floors guide customers to the department they are looking for.
In 2025, Ikea France, which publishes limited annual information in November, had sales of €3.5billion, down 4.4% on 2024.
Online sales in the country accounted for 28.9% of its total sales, while the number of people buying in stores remained stable at 57.7 million. The company employs 12,000 people in France.
In another initiative, French sports chain Decathlon is opening a pilot “store within a store” in an Ikea shop in Croydon, south London. If successful, it will be copied in other Ikea stores.
