What a great Ikea!

Affordability and quality go hand in hand at Ikea stores.BURBANK -- Only Ikea executives and city of Burbank officials might have known that “Swedish simplicity” would work in trendy Southern California 15 years ago.

When the 220,000-square-foot home furnishings store opened on a six-acre site at 600 N. San Fernando Blvd. in 1990 it was only the second Ikea store in the nation and the first one on the West Coast, said spokeswoman Yumiko Whitaker. Whitaker used the phrase “Swedish simplicity” to describe the engineering, styling and cost controls that go into the store’s home furnishings.

“It needs to be stylish and functional,” Whitaker said. “We want you to be able to use the furniture whether you have some children or you need something stylish for a dinner party and not be embarrassed.”

The concept is to save as much money on shipping and handling and put the savings into the product so the consumer doesn’t have to sacrifice quality for affordability, Whitaker said.

“That’s always been the Ikea concept,” Whitaker said. “When Ikea designers sit down to make a product, they start with the price tag. But we don’t take it out of the merchandise.”

Founded in Sweden in 1943, Ikea was successful in Europe and Canada and it opened its first U.S. store in Plymouth Meeting, Penn., in 1985.

Five years later the company was looking for a California foothold, Whitaker said.

“The retail landscape was so different then,” she said. “There were no big-box retailers.”

A move 3,000 miles away might have seemed like a risk but “Burbank worked because the community embraced the Ikea concept,” Whitaker said.

Sue Georgino, the city of Burbank’s Community Development director, traveled all the way to Plymouth Meeting in the late 1980s to check out the Ikea there to see how it might fit in Burbank.

“At that point, Burbank was competing in a marketplace that had successful regional malls in Sherman Oaks and like the Glendale Galleria and we were looking at a market niche,” Georgino said. “There was no Ikea at the time but it met the needs of a large population. We have a very successful product with a very successful marketing strategy that set our regional mall apart from others in the area.”

Ikea has become an integral part of the community.

“They are a significant contributor to the city as a sales tax producer,” Georgino said. “We’ve done some numbers and they [annually] attract about 2 million people to downtown Burbank.”

Beside the tax base, Ikea is involved with a number of philanthropic activities.

“They are amazing. You would think a company with that size would think that ‘we don’t need to be a corporate citizen’ because of the sheer numbers, but they never take that approach,” Georgino said.