The Swedish furniture company is rolling out trials of certain kinds of coverage in specific stores.
IKEA Group, the furniture giant from Sweden, has taken its first steps into the selling insurance policies, after having rolled out a trial program of certain types of coverage product in its Swedish stores.
Those insurance products will become available within the a couple of weeks, as a test of the market.
The first insurance policies that were rolled out in a few select stores in Sweden by IKEA were child and pregnancy coverage. Those hit the stores on October first under the Omifall brand. Over the next few weeks, however, this will be extending beyond those smaller forms of coverage and will bring in homeowners insurance offerings, as well.
These first insurance policy sales at the initial store locations will represent a kind of soft launch of the company’s offerings.
The first step of the strategy is to appeal to the 2.5 million people who are members of the IKEA loyalty club within that country. This could then bring about an expansion of the range of insurance products and it could also send the offerings abroad, though that would not occur until later on in the process. At the moment, the loyalty club for the company has an estimated 59 million members around the world.
At the time that this article was written IKEA chose to decline the opportunity to commenting further on this rollout of coverage products or on the addition of other types of coverage. At the moment, both the child products and the homeowners insurance offerings are being handled by the Ikano Group, which is part of the IKEA empire, owned by the three sons of the founder of the company, Ingvar Kamprad, who is now 88 years old
Though this is not the first time that Ikano has sold insurance policies, this does represent the first time that those products are brought into the IKEA furniture business, which was kept entirely separate from those products in the past. Some have speculated that this represents a shift in the way that the company is being run as the sons start to play a growing role in the operations of the business.
