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    Warum kann IKEA Nitori in Japan nicht schlagen? Die traurige Geschichte hinter dem Versäumnis, die Filialen zu erweitern, und der Schließung der Filialen in Shinjuku und Harajuku

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    2. Standard_Pound_2918 on

      Ordinally consumers prefer a little convenience over design.

      I thought Shinjuku and Harajuku stores mainly sell small interior goods, and the main customers are people who go to the area often. They mainly go around by public transportation and live in a tiny apartment (mostly rent), and not those who go to a large IKEA store in the suburbs by car and own a detached house.

      Most Japanese apartment rooms for those people and IKEA aren’t a good fit. Even if inhabitants place IKEA accessories, their room is still crap, and they are disappointed. Nitori, on the other hand, fit Japanese room.

    3. chari_de_kita on

      I don’t recall if I’ve ever bought anything from either one in over 10 years of living in Tokyo.

      Closest I got to Ikea was when I got one of those blue bags from someone who was giving away a bunch of plastic file trays. I use it for laundry now.

    4. Affectionate_Use_486 on

      Nitori is better quality. Both are pretty low frill but Nitori is hands down better. When I had to buy furniture a couple years back I did the hunt for shops and minus places like HOMES which had a ton of good stuff. Nitori was just everywhere, had decent prices for mid tier items and had good customer service.

    5. Glittering-Move-3881 on

      I don’t know if this is related, but when I was getting a quote from a moving company, they mentioned that they hate dealing with IKEA furnitures (or they charge extra?).

      That kinda made me steer away from IKEA furnitures.

    6. Training-Chain-5572 on

      „Because Nitori exists“ doesn’t exactly warrant a 2 page news article.

      「構造も比較的複雑だ」

      This reads like someone who has never bought a furniture from Nitori. Ikea is the easiest to assemble out of all furniture shops and it’s not even close. Somehow they’re the only company in the world able to make sensible manuals that you can understand without any prior experience. Nitori will give you 3 pages of text explaining 15 different things you’re not allowed to do with what you bought before even getting to an instruction.

      We bought 2 different laundry racks, one from Ikea and one from Nitori. The one from Ikea came in one piece, no assembly required. The one from Nitori came in 7 different pieces where they were almost identical but not exactly, could only be assembled in a very specific way, and the manual had tiny pictures so you couldn’t differentiate between the pieces. It takes up more space in our house while holding half the amount of laundry the one from Ikea does.

      There are probably a multitude of reasons why Ikea isn’t doing as well as Nitori but the article completely misses those and just lists „Nitori understands the Japanese spirit“ without explaining how or why.

    7. TastyCheeseRolls on

      I hardly imagine IKEA would be too worried about their little experiment failure here.
      Their big-box stores out in suburbia are just doing fine, judging by the crowds you see there, even on weekdays.

    8. Embarrassed-Part-890 on

      They shouldn’t feel ashamed rarely any foreign brand makes it big in Japan

    9. tatsumi-sama on

      Heck I sometimes go to ikea just for the food, maybe they should try placing some ikea restaurants around town

    11. kjbbbreddd on

      IKEA has so few locations that I rarely ever recommend shopping there. On the other hand, Nitori has a solid online presence, so if they have a good product, there’s pretty much nothing stopping me from recommending it.

    13. highway_chance on

      In my experience Ikea is difficult because they use their own tools which makes them more difficult to disassemble and put back together when moving. Somewhere like very urbanized Japan where people move pretty frequently, the struggle to pull them apart without breaking them and then making sure you don’t lose any of the exclusive mini wrenches or nuts is a bitch.

    14. SufficientTangelo136 on

      We shop at both for small items, generally I find IKEA has better designs and Nitori tends to be very bland but some items are decent quality.

      That said, after we bought our house we decided we would buy from either for anything of our main furniture.

    15. senseiman on

      I’ve got both an IKEA and a Nitori in my area and have shopped at both.

      On balance I prefer IKEA for most furniture, but its not a slam dunk or anything and I have some stuff from Nitori too. Some Nitori stuff is OK and a functionally is designed with small Japanese housing in mind which has its benefits. On the downside I find a lot of NItori’s furniture to be kind of ugly in design ot the point that I wouldn’t even want it in my house at all. IKEA stuff isn’t necessarily great in that regard either but on balance I can at least live with it. And some categories like shelving or outdoor furniture IKEA is way better on the merits.

    16. fumienohana on

      I mean isn’t it just preference? Out of every furniture / 収納品 I chose for our new place, 2 wagon are from IKEA only because they are cheaper and they fit. The rest are all from Rakuten – again because they are in the style that I wanted, and the size fits.

      All small things are from Nitori tho, fr I would only use bed covers and curtains from Nitori. IKEA idk, just doesn’t seem accessible enough. Like IKEA are for dates and Nitori are just normal weekend shopping

    17. uibutton on

      Nothing was ever in stock in Shinjuku or Harajuku so I would need to check Shibuya but even then it usually proved to be more efficient to just go to bloody Tachikawa and see what I was thinking to buy.

    19. Lightingway on

      Nitori is so cheap and accessible in Japan. I’ve never gone to an Ikea once, I don’t even know where they are in the area. But I know the locations of various Nitoris.

      IKEA may have an image based appeal, but they don’t hold a candle to Nitori for accessibility.

    20. jitenshasw on

      Nitori furniture is made for tight Japanese spaces. Look at Ikea furniture and there’s so many „aesthetic“, squarish bits that are not mindful about space.

    21. lmtzless on

      ikea wins in design and that matters to me a lot, not so much for most folks i guess. for the price you pay, it’s the best value for anything remotely aesthetically pleasing.

    22. lostllama2015 on

      I’m hesitant to buy anything from Nitori. I bought a mattress from them ~6 years ago, and a couple of years into owning it a spring started poking out from its internal container. Nitori accepted the fault, but couldn’t directly replace it.

      The problem: They no longer sold the specific model of mattress, and the equivalent one they were selling would see me basically paying the same amount (the difference – prices had gone up) as I originally paid for the mattress again. No desire to make it right, etc. even though it was still under warranty.

      After much back and forth, they eventually at least agreed to refund what I’d originally paid for the mattress and took it back. I used the refund to purchase a new mattress from IKEA. 4 or so years on, it’s still in great condition, it’s got a 10-year warranty (so ~6 years remaining), and it’s still sold by IKEA so if there was a defect, they could replace it with a new one.

      I’ll buy cheap stuff from Nitori now, or low-wear items like a bookcase, but I won’t purchase something like a mattress or sofa from them.

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