Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad had a hard time remembering numbers—giving way to the brand’s famously difficult-to-pronounce products—but one doesn’t become the world’s biggest furniture business without them. In 2025, Ikea, which now has over 500 stores across 63 countries and territories, reported global retail sales of over €44.6 billion (around $52.6 billion).

The brand has created an in-store experience centered around vast showrooms, competitive prices, and, yes, Swedish meatballs. Now, it’s reassembling its strategy around three main elements: new store rollouts, investment in e-commerce, and dynamic partnerships.

A smörgåsbord of revenue streams

If you ask Rob Olson, interim CEO of Ikea US, Ikea is not a furniture brand but rather a “concept company.” This is perhaps one explanation for the success of the business famous for its giant blue warehouses, but how does that translate to an e-commerce environment? Olson said he is trying to make Ikea’s online operation feel like the showroom bedrooms and hallways customers are already familiar with.

“If you were to walk into a room set, [you could] find your sofa along with your best TV unit and a Billy bookcase off to the side to complete your solution. We need to be able to do that [on] the web as well,” Olson said.

One of the ways he and his team are making this happen is by implementing AI tools that allow customers to imagine what their room could look like after an Ikea glow-up.

“You can take a photo of your living room, and then you can erase what you have in there, [and] put in a new sofa, etcetera,” Olson said.

Ikea is also pursuing partnerships and collaborations to boost growth, including with TaskRabbit (for at-home furniture assembly), Disney (for pop-up shops), and Best Buy (for in-store crossovers).

“[It’s] about how to take the customer experience to the next level,” Olson said.

Ikea like you’ve never seen it before

In the last couple years, Ikea has been opening small-format stores to reach new customers who perhaps haven’t made the trek to the supersized version. Decisions like this are not made in a vacuum and always start with considering nearby retail locations.

Learn about Ikea’s more flexible store approach.—BS

“A World Cup is 104 Super Bowls in one month,” said FIFA president Gianni Infantino. That’s food for thought for the planet’s biggest brands, which will be falling over themselves to make an impact on the billions of people who tune in every four years. It’s also an opportunity to build on the growing popularity of “the beautiful game” in North America.

Jointly hosted by Canada, Mexico, and the United States this time around, the World Cup puts brands, athletes, and the world’s top soccer leagues in the shop window. One of those leagues is firmly ahead of the game: Spain’s premier soccer division, LaLiga, has been building its brand in the region for some time now.

• In 2018, it established LaLiga North America—a joint venture with soccer media company Relevent Sports Group—with the aim of bringing Spanish soccer to audiences in the US, Canada, and Mexico through broadcasting, IRL events, and sponsorships.

“The US from a sports ecosystem perspective is the most competitive in the world,” said Santiago Lucio, head of partnerships sales at LaLiga North America. “We knew that we needed to have that level of structure to be able to really offer a compelling value proposition to brands in the market.”

In order to do this, Lucio said it needed to match the asset mix of other US sports properties (broadcast, digital, social media) to offer a “full-funnel strategy.”

According to Michael LoRé, who provides PR for LaLiga North America, the joint venture achieved profitability in its third year. (It does not break out financial results.) Lucio credits this performance to its long-term growth strategy of capturing the North American market and appealing to big-box companies like Walmart and Lowe’s.

Plan the next move with LaLiga’s rev strategy in mind.—LI

As the global influencer marketing industry continues to grow at a rapid pace—according to research platform Statista, it was estimated to reach $32 billion in 2025, up 35% from the previous year—it’s no surprise that many consumer brands have joined the trend.

One brand that’s set a precedent for influencer marketing is beauty titan Tarte Cosmetics.

• In 2005, Tarte launched on QVC after starting from founder Maureen Kelly’s apartment in New York City. When she started the company in 1999, “magazines were the influencers of the day,” Kelly told the Today show in 2022.
• The brand was one of the first to start working with professional influencers through its “Trippin with Tarte” brand trips, which brought influencers together for an all-expenses paid trip.

“I guess you could say it was influencer marketing before influencer marketing even had a name,” Kelly said. “I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but we’ve created what’s known as the influencer brand trip. There was no playbook to follow. I was just following my gut and that philosophy still holds true today. You can buy reach, but you can’t buy relationships, and that’s why I’ve always focused on something deeper than a transaction.”

“Trippin with Tarte” is positioned as a full-on brand experience, with influencers decked out in Tarte merchandise staying in lavish accommodations decorated with Tarte logos and symbols and attending local excursions, all of which is curated in a way that makes for good social media content. The trips have attracted attention for their lavish nature, garnering speculation in prior years over its influencer marketing budget.

Inventing the brand trip

Tarte hosted its first brand trip in 2015 as the influencer landscape was taking shape. Kelly hosted the trip herself without an events team at a small rental house in Turks and Caicos and was what she described as “cheap and cheerful.”

Since the first event, “Trippin with Tarte” has grown both in terms of the trips themselves—they’ve taken place in locations like Dubai and Bora Bora, and included major influencers like Alix Earle, Monet McMichael, and Desi Perkins—and in social media virality.

Keep reading about Tarte’s sweet success with brand trips.—LI

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