Ikea is growing its resale business. It's attracting bargain hunters and design nerds.

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Alex Bitter

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Your old Ikea bookshelf is part of a growing secondhand market.

Ikea has spent five years growing its buyback and resell division, which pays customers for their old Ikea-brand furniture in store credit and resells it at the chain's stores.

In September, buyback and resell will be available in every full-format US Ikea store when the retailer starts offering the option at its Brooklyn store, said Bryan Walker, country product quality manager for Ikea US.

For shoppers, buying secondhand has long been a way to save money across a range of products. It's also become a bigger business over the last several years, from side-hustlers selling clothes on marketplaces like Depop to major brands like REI selling used outdoor gear.

Used furniture has a particular attraction because of the high price of buying new pieces, and customers can often find designs not readily seen in large showrooms. Nowadays, sites like Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist are packed with used furniture from all eras.

At Ikea, the buyback program has taken back about 53,000 items over the past five years, Walker said. Customers get a quote showing how much Ikea will pay them for their furniture on Ikea's website. Then, they can bring it into a store to drop it off and get their credit.

For a large black Kallax bookcase with minor scratches, for example, Ikea will pay $69.65 at a store in the Washington, DC area, according to the website. An "as new" version would be worth about $10 more, while a "well-used" bookcase would earn about $10 less. A new version of the bookcase sells for almost $300.

Ikea employees inspect the items that the company buys back. In some cases, the furniture needs cleaning or repair before the company puts it up for sale at in the As-Is section, Walker said.

From cheap bookcases to post-modern desks

Many of the items that the stores repurchase are used — and therefore cheaper — versions of what it sells new in the stores.

That appeals to customers who are trying to save money, Walker said. "I can't have a conversation about secondhand without talking about affordability," he told Business Insider.

Other items attract more design-focused shoppers. Walker said that some Ikea stores have bought back pieces from its Stockholm collection, a higher-priced line that includes a sofa that costs $2,000 new.

A couple of months ago, one Ikea store bought back the program's oldest piece of furniture to date: A post-modern Signatur executive desk that Ikea started selling in the 1980s — the same decade it opened its first US stores.

Pieces like the desk appeal to customers who are looking for a specific style, Walker said. "It's just the perfect encapsulation of really simple form," he said.

Customers who participate in the buyback program visit an Ikea store 50% more on average in the six months afterward, Walker said — "a really significant impact" that creates more loyal customers, he said.

"A lot of businesses see secondhand as a side business," Walker said. "I do see this as a growth area for us."

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Alex Bitter

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Alex Bitter is a senior retail reporter covering the gig economy, food, and retail. His work focuses major gig delivery and ride-hailing apps, including Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and Walmart's Spark. He is interested in everything from what it's like to work on the apps to the companies' business strategies.Some of his recent stories feature gig workers who have been deactivated on the apps, DoorDash hiring traditional employees to make deliveries, gig workers' use of bots, and gig work expanding into new professions, such as nursing.Alex has also written about Aldi's US expansion, Starbucks' turnaround efforts, and the fallout from Kraft-Heinz's budget cutting. Convenience store chain Sheetz ended its "smile policy" after his reporting.Before joining Insider in September 2020, he wrote about consumer and retail companies for S&P Global Market Intelligence. He's a graduate of the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and grew up on the Big Island.Alex lives in the Washington, DC, area, where you can find him studying ancient coins or searching for Civil War artifacts with his metal detector in his free time.Got a tip? Reach out at [email protected] or via encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 (808) 854-4501.

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