What Luxury Can Learn from IKEA’s Procurement Playbook

Sometimes the best inspiration for luxury comes from where we least expect it. As a luxury goods and retail consultant, I would not usually profile IKEA alongside the luxury industry.

After all, IKEA is built on cost leadership and accessibility, while luxury thrives on exclusivity, heritage, and scarcity. Yet, there are powerful lessons to be learned from how IKEA has grown into a multi-billion-dollar company over the past 80+ years.

What fascinates me is how IKEA managed to build such scale and resilience through its procurement and supply chain strategy. While the drivers of luxury are very different, there are ideas worth borrowing when it comes to category management, supplier collaboration, and sustainability at scale.

1. Category Management: Structure That Liberates Creativity

IKEA has long used structured category management - grouping spend areas, assigning ownership, and creating clear roadmaps. This discipline ensures every decision contributes to efficiency, quality, and innovation.

In luxury, procurement often reflects the artistry of the maisons; highly decentralised, bespoke, and shaped by unique relationships. But this can lead to inefficiencies or duplication. A more structured approach to categories, even in indirect spend like packaging, logistics, or store fittings, could free up time and resources to focus on the truly differentiating elements of luxury: craftsmanship and design. Structure, in this sense, doesn’t limit creativity, it actually protects it.

2. Supplier Collaboration: From Preservation to Co-Creation

IKEA’s growth has been built on long-term supplier partnerships, where collaboration goes beyond contracts into co-creating solutions, from flat-pack designs to sustainable materials.

Luxury already prizes its suppliers, the leather tanneries in Italy, the watchmakers in Switzerland, the embroidery ateliers in Paris. These relationships are precious, but often treated mainly as guardians of tradition. Imagine reframing them as co-innovation partners: not just preserving heritage, but actively shaping the future of materials, sustainability, and production methods. This could unlock breakthroughs such as bio-based fabrics, circular processes, or new methods of traceability that keep luxury ahead of shifting consumer expectations.

3. Sustainability at Scale: Beyond Symbolic Initiatives

Luxury has made important strides in sustainability, regenerative farms, traceable gemstones, limited runs of recycled fabrics. Yet these often remain boutique initiatives. They make headlines but rarely shift the full weight of the supply chain.

What IKEA has shown is the power of embedding sustainability at the heart of procurement and applying it consistently across categories. It’s not an add-on - it’s systemic. For luxury, the challenge is unique: how to scale sustainability without undermining exclusivity. The answer lies in weaving sustainability into procurement choices every day, across the board. This doesn’t dilute luxury; it strengthens credibility and ensures sustainability becomes part of the maison’s story, not just its campaign.

4. Procurement as a Brand Protector

For IKEA, procurement has never been just a back-office function; it has been a strategic enabler of growth and brand promise. Procurement decisions determined not only costs, but product design, quality, and even customer experience.

Luxury can take inspiration from this positioning. Too often, procurement in luxury is viewed as operational support rather than a strategic partner. In reality, every sourcing choice from a tannery to a packaging supplier, is a brand-defining decision. By elevating procurement into a brand-protecting, value-creating function, maisons can ensure that sourcing choices reinforce exclusivity, authenticity, and trust.

Closing Thought

Luxury and IKEA sit at opposite ends of the retail spectrum. One thrives on affordability and accessibility, the other on rarity and prestige. Yet, strong procurement practices transcend those differences.

Luxury brands that embrace category discipline, collaborative supplier innovation, and scalable sustainability will not only strengthen their operations but also reinforce the very qualities that make them desirable.

Sometimes, inspiration for the future of luxury comes from places we least expect - even from the flat-pack giant of Sweden.