If you’re a twenty something, it may already have happened: that awkward moment when you realize all your friends have the same Pinsoshen coffee table from IKEA. The Swedish brand’s reputation for stocking stylish furniture and selling it for low prices has made it a one-stop shop for cash-strapped students furnishing their first apartments. But when do they leave IKEA behind in favor of something more grown-up? We wanted to find out, so we analyzed data from Earnest , a Priceonomics customer. We analyzed a dataset of more than 10,000 anonymous user responses on spending habits. When does it begin? When does it end? And where do people turn when they’re ready for something new? We first wanted to know how reliance on IKEA changes over a person’s lifetime, so we calculated the percent of our clients who shopped at IKEA. For the sake of comparison, we did the same for Lowe’s, a home improvement chain with similar overall popularity within our dataset. As it turns out, age 34 is when you start to outgrow IKEA:
It’s written in the data: you’re more likely to buy from IKEA when you’re 24 than at any other time in your life. IKEA remains popular throughout the late 20s and early 30s, but drops after age 34. We may as well call the 10-year period spanning the mid-20s and mid-30s the “IKEA decade.” Lowe’s, meanwhile, shows the opposite trend: people are more likely to shop there as they get older. This makes sense, as increasing homeownership means more home improvement projects. We wanted to further explore where shoppers turn once they grow out of their IKEA interiors. For each of 14 top furniture retailers, we found the age when the most respondents reported shopping at that store. We tabulated those “peak customer ages” below. Not only is IKEA popular among young adults, it is the only retailer with a peak customer age below 30. People in their 30s are more likely to shop stores that specialize in housewares and home accessories like Bed Bath & Beyond and Williams-Sonoma - perhaps because their IKEA furniture is still serving them well.
The oldest customers in our dataset prefer to do it themselves, favoring Home Depot and Lowe’s. When buying ready-to-use furniture, they visit big-box retailers like Ashley Furniture. Beyond age, we were curious about which personal attributes predict furniture retailer preference. We calculated the percent of men and women in our sample claiming to shop each brand. By and large, men and women visit the same stores when they go furniture shopping. And they visit IKEA in particularly even numbers. But do-it-yourself stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s are visited by men more often than women, and women visit most of the other stores we considered in greater numbers than men. Does geographic location influence retailer preference? We next looked at the percent of respondents from each state who identified themselves as IKEA shoppers. Results are listed below for all states for which we had at least 10 respondents. The Swedish brand began its North American expansion in the mid-Atlantic states, and this region still has the most IKEA brick-and-mortars.
But it doesn’t lay claim to the most shoppers; that distinction goes to the Midwest and West Coast, which are home to the top 8 states. This ranking is curiously uncorrelated to a listing of IKEA’s store locations. The top 4 states have just one store apiece. The popularity of IKEA in the west may have less to do with store ubiquity and more to do with lifestyle attributes that make the brand a natural fit. IKEA furniture is a ubiquitous feature of the 20-something’s apartment. But at some point, IKEA furniture tends to get replaced with furniture from more upscale, “adult” stores—but when? Earnest, a student loan startup, put together some data on when people age out of their IKEA shopping habits, and found that it happens at about 34 years old, per Popular Mechanics. Earnest's data comes from tens of thousands of loan applicants who responded to their survey. The company compared the ages of people who turn first to IKEA for their furniture needs to those who go to Lowe’s, Crate & Barrel, and other stores.
IKEA is the only store whose peak customer age is below 30, according to Earnest, while people in their 30s tend to go to Bed Bath & Beyond and Williams-Sonoma, though that doesn’t mean they’re not still sitting on their IKEA couch. And most people who are more than 40 years old go to hardware/home improvement stores like Home Depot or Lowes. But what the Earnest analysis is missing is that people’s preferences don’t just change because they’re getting older; as age increases, so does purchasing power in most households. Consider this graph on median household income by age in the United States, drawn from data from a 2015 Census report. It’s no surprise that people make a lot more money at age 35 than they do at 25. So not only might they be tired of the standard Scandinavian aesthetic, they might also not worry quite as much about dropping $1200 on a new couch. Household Income by Age There are currently four boxes of yet-to-be-built IKEA furniture in my apartment, because I am 26 years old and have a paycheck that reflects that (not to mention I don’t live in a two-income household).
I love mass-produced Swedish flat-pack design, but more importantly, looking at furniture from other stores gives me heart palpitations—I certainly can’t afford to shop at CB2, despite the fact that it calls itself “affordable.” Until my income doubles, I'll probably be enjoying my MALM-themed bedroom. At least it appears that I'm not the only one in that situation. Banner image courtesy of iStock; all other images courtesy of Earnest unless otherwise noted.JOHANNESBURG—Steinhoff International Holdings NV, Africa’s retailing giant but little-known outside the continent, has made its first foray into the U.S., agreeing to pay $2.4 billion for Sleepy’s owner Mattress Firm Holding Corp. Steinhoff, a family-owned furniture seller based outside Cape Town, South Africa, is called “Africa’s IKEA” for its home furnishing retail chains. Until recently, it had trained its sights on expansion in Europe, from Germany and Switzerland to Poland and Bulgaria, and Australasia.