Selected work · the IKEA track record · crisis turnaround
A store bleeding €100K a week. We stopped it.
IKEA La Madeleine in Paris was losing around €100K a week to network outages. This was not a planned project, it was an emergency. We stabilized it fast, then used the same intervention to turn it to +€3M a year. Built inside IKEA: track record, not a Three Four client engagement.
Before, and after.
- Around €100K a week in lost sales from network outages
- Constant downtime, an unreliable store platform
- Google rating stuck at 3.2 stars, foot traffic falling
- +€3M a year in revenue, the bleeding stopped and reversed
- Network downtime down 95%, 99.9% uptime
- Google rating up to 3.6 stars, foot traffic +20%
The turn, in order.
Speed first, then root cause, then growth. The sequence is the point.
Stop the bleeding
First, triage. We treated it as the emergency it was, not a roadmap item, and stabilized the network so sales stopped dropping while we fixed the cause.
Re-architect the infrastructure
We moved the store onto dual physical servers for resilience, cutting network downtime by 95% and reaching 99.9% uptime.
Renegotiate the coverage
We worked with the carriers (Free, Orange, Bouygues, SFR) to offload in-store traffic onto 4G, cutting Wi-Fi load by 40% and removing the single point of failure.
Lift the store
On the now-stable base, we redesigned the store layout and customer experience with a 25-person cross-functional team, turning recovery into growth.
When something is on fire, you do not want a deck.
You want operators who stop the loss first and find the cause second. If you are in that situation, start with a FOCAL Diagnostic and we will tell you straight what we see.