Commercial Strategy, Customer Experience & Concept Development
Hervé Laengel.
Thirty-two years at IKEA and Ingka, from the checkouts of a Paris-region store to IKEA's first store in India, then a model for fitting the IKEA store into a shopping centre, applied in some thirty centres. With The 34 Group since September 2026, he takes on store concept and store opening missions, including training the sales teams who will run the floor.
The numbers behind the record.
Hervé joined IKEA in July 1994 and left Ingka Centres at the end of August 2026. As department manager in Toulon (2003 to 2007) he ran three departments carrying about 30% of the store's turnover, and took consumer-credit selling from one contract per co-worker per week to between six and ten, which made his team number one in the store on that line.
In India he led the commercial planning and build-up of IKEA's first store in the country, in Hyderabad, through its opening in August 2018. He planned its showroom, about 4,000 square metres, designed to carry 57% of the store's sales.
His signature rollout is the national switch from one kitchen range to its successor (2012 to 2014): 29 stores moved on a single date with zero lost revenue, in a category then worth a quarter of the company's French turnover. He led the national implementation group of eight, one leader per domain, and worked through at least five people in every store. None of them reported to him. Behind it stood a ten-year after-sales commitment to customers.
From stores to shopping centres.
At Ingka Centres (2019 to 2026) he built the model that fits the IKEA store into a shopping centre, applied in some thirty centres. He ran workshops with more than 200 people in 12 centres across the China, Europe and Nordic clusters, and opened each one on an uncomfortable number: about 60% of a centre's visitors did not go into the IKEA store. At Västerås, opening the market hall onto the gallery as a direct entrance brought 60 more visitors a day. At Hammersmith, the IKEA store reworked its shop windows after a training session he ran, and its footfall rose by 2%.
Most of that work ran through people who did not report to him. Per project he led cross-functional teams of up to about 20, drawn from IKEA store teams and centre teams. He had no budget. On new projects his workshop output became the brief for the architect and the IKEA store team, at Market Street in the US and at Gurgaon in India.
Work with an operator who builds.
A 30-minute diagnostic on your store or your next opening: we look at the floor with you and give you the first three things we would change. The full programme is called The Selling Floor.