Selected work · the IKEA track record
IKEA Digital Price Tags: a rollout that reached 150+ stores across 10 countries, delivered.
We turned a price-tag rollout that was being sold as paper-and-ink savings into a data, geo-location and supply-chain platform. This is track record, not a Three Four client engagement: it is the operator work, built over years inside IKEA, that the firm is built on.
The problem.
Digital price tags were stuck. Internally they were framed as a way to save on paper and ink, a small cost line that could never justify a global rollout. The business case was thin, and a thin case does not move a company the size of IKEA.
The decision.
We refused the paper-savings framing. A price tag is not a label, it is a sensor and a position in the store. We rebuilt the case as a data, geo-location and supply-chain platform: NFC and RFID for live inventory, in-store navigation for customers, and logistics signal for the supply chain. Then we proved it fast, securing a €200K pilot budget from the CFO and shipping the first store in two days.
What we built.
An NFC and RFID digital price-tag system that carried far more than a price: live inventory location, customer navigation, and a feed into supply-chain logistics, deployed toward 400+ stores. Hardware, software and the store operations to adopt it, not a slide. The pilot ran live in the New York Queens store within two days of go-ahead.
The numbers.
On the floor it showed up as speed: price changes cut from 5 minutes to 20 seconds, full-store updates from a week to 5 minutes, and staff training from 2 hours to 30 minutes. The reframing, not the hardware, is what unlocked the value.
Want this thinking on your problem?
The skill here was not the tags. It was refusing the small framing and finding the platform underneath. That is what a FOCAL Diagnostic does for your situation.