IKEA’s most radical idea yet: keeping what already exists

To understand why this matters, you have to go back to IKEA’s roots. In 1943, a 17-year-old boy named Ingvar Kamprad started IKEA in a small Swedish village. His dream was audaciously simple: to make good design accessible for the many, not the few. That idea reshaped how the world furnishes its homes from student dorms in Lisbon to family flats in Seoul.

But scale has a shadow. For every Billy bookcase delivered, there’s one eventually discarded. For every sleek new Slack sidetable, another sits unused in a garage.

To solve this, long before the digital resell store IKEA Preowned was launched, IKEA introduced its physical cousin, called Buy Back & Resell. Launched globally in November 2020 across 27 countries, the program invited customers to return used IKEA furniture in exchange for store credit. The company would inspect, price and resell it in a dedicated section, giving each item a second life.

What started as a fun experiment quickly became something deeper: a test of what a circular IKEA could look like in practice. Some markets ran small pilots; others made it permanent. In several countries – including the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands – Buy Back & Resell is now a standing service.

For some customers, it was just a nice sustainability gesture. For IKEA, it was a real revolution in logistics, trust and design. It revealed two truths that would shape everything that followed:

1. People will return furniture if it’s easy and fair. When the process was frictionless – no paperwork, just a simple exchange – people showed up. Whole families brought in old dining tables, students found preloved, affordable desks, and suddenly second-hand became something people felt good about.
2. Furniture, if built well, can circulate almost endlessly. The buyback program became a living stress test for IKEA’s own designs. Some pieces returned after ten years were still structurally sound, proof that durability wasn’t the issue, circulation was.

The success of that program laid the groundwork for IKEA Preowned. If Buy Back & Resell was teaching IKEA how to take things back, Preowned is teaching them how to hand them down, connecting buyers and sellers directly, peer-to-peer, instead of through a store counter.

By the end of 2024, the Preowned pilot in Madrid and Oslo had already drawn 200,000 visits, and by early 2025 it officially launched across the rest of Spain. Next: Belgium, and then the rest of Europe. Together, Buy Back & Resell and Preowned form a kind of circular symphony: one physical, one digital, but both orchestrated towards the same goal. Making reuse the default.

IKEA Preowned exists in the quiet handover between two strangers on a Saturday afternoon. In the car boot loaded with a Billy bookcase that’s about to see its third apartment. In the click of a ‘sold’ button on a platform that feels less like a marketplace and more like a conversation.

That’s the genius of it: IKEA Preowned is a system that turns small human gestures into a large cultural shift. We live in an age of excess. Furniture has become disposable, easier to replace than to repair. Our homes are full, our landfills fuller. Yet here comes IKEA – a company practically synonymous with mass consumption – suggesting that the real luxury might be keeping things longer.

For commercial companies, there’s courage in telling people they might not need new things.

As Jesper Brodin, CEO of Ingka Group, put it: ‘Sometimes you simply have to trust your instincts. This is a societal movement, and if we stayed on the sidelines, we would’ve missed the boat.’

That ‘movement’ isn’t small. The global second-hand furniture market is growing at roughly 6.4% per year, and already 10% of it is IKEA products. That’s millions of chairs, sofas and lamps finding new homes instead of landfills.

It’s not just good optics; it’s good systems thinking. If IKEA can build an infrastructure that makes reuse as easy as purchase, then circularity stops being an idea and starts being a habit. And habits change the world.

IKEA Preowned challenges the very definition of progress. For decades, economic growth has been tied to production: more factories, more products, more sales. Preowned flips that equation: the goal isn’t to sell fewer tables, it’s to make tables that can live more lives, so that existing tables can be resold.

This shift is bigger than furniture. It’s about changing how we see ownership itself. The idea that something can be valuable because it has history, not in spite of it. That scratches tell stories, and become part of the design. And when a company like IKEA – built on affordability and newness – embraces that mindset, it ripples far beyond the furniture aisle.

Behind the scenes, Preowned is already shaping how IKEA designs its future products. Think of it as ‘preowned-ready’ design: pieces that are easier to disassemble, repair and reassemble, so they can pass smoothly from one home to the next.

In circular design terms, that’s massive. It means designing not just for function, but for re-function. It’s no coincidence that IKEA’s larger sustainability agenda talks about an ‘absolute decoupling of virgin, non-renewable material use from IKEA business growth, with an increase in the share of recycled and renewable content in IKEA products to at least 90%.’ Preowned isn’t a pilot; it’s a prototype for how that vision can actually work in real life.

Of course, the story’s still unfolding. Will IKEA Preowned expand to every European market and beyond? Almost certainly, though the logistics are complex: verifying quality, managing transport and keeping the process effortless.

But perhaps the biggest question: will this change how we all behave? The next few years will tell.

IKEA Preowned may not be glamorous. There’s no shiny showroom or influencer launch party. It’s a collection of small, ordinary acts that - stitched together - start to look like a blueprint for a different kind of economy. That’s what makes IKEA Preowned a pioneer. It dared to question what we take for granted. In doing so, it offers a gentle reminder: the future might not be about having more things, but about letting the same things live more lives.