IKEA Will Die If It Expects Indians To DIY

by

Nine years after I wrote Changing Face of DIY Markets, it’s still not so easy to get carpenters, electricians and plumbers for doing small household repair and home improvement jobs in India.

At the time, the matching of demand from consumers with supply of of handymen was quite inefficient, with most online portals offering only listing services. That has changed – over 50 startups offer end-to-end fulfilment services now e.g. HouseJoy, UrbanClap.

But availability is still an issue. Every time I’ve tried one of these “Uber for Handyman” services, I’ve had to follow up at least once or twice before the handyman turned up.

To me it appears as though the challenge of finding good quality handymen has shifted from me to these apps during the last decade, as a result of which my job of following up is now directed at these apps instead of the handymen. Besides, some of these startups have already shut down within a year or two of launching e.g. DoorMint, TaskBob.

Nevertheless, India still hasn’t transformed into a DIY market.

There’s new buzz on this subject on the wake of the opening of the first IKEA store in Hyderabad in India last week. That’s natural because the iconic Swedish furniture retailer is renowned for its knocked-down furniture kits that require assembly by customers aka DIY.

The media is full of articles speculating whether IKEA would be successful if it adheres to its DIY philosophy in India. Pundits have offered their own take on why Indians are still DIY-shy.

Take, for example, Chidanand Rajghatta. In his RUMINATIONS column entitled Time DIY-Challenged Indians learnt to make their own beds published in a recent edition of Sunday Times, the columnist points out that Indians are culturally predisposed to “mental calisthenics rather than physical labor”.

I agree. I got a rude exposure to this fact as soon as I joined IIT Bombay. One of the speakers at the induction program held during my first few days was a professor from the Electrical Engineering Department. He was rated by the much-revered IEEE as one of the Top 50 electrical engineers in the world. Explaining the institute’s style of pedagogy, he told us, sheepishly but also somewhat proudly, that he always ran to find the nearest electrician whenever the fuse in his house blew! That was in 1980. I don’t think this cultural impediment to DIY is much different nearly 40 years later.

All roads lead to IKEA Hyderabad!

Then DIY also goes beyond culture. It requires skills and tools.

With the emphasis on mental calisthenics in school and college, Indians are not taught DIY skills.

Indians are also notoriously reluctant to use tools. It’s as though as they’re scared of losing credit for doing a job if they use tools. It also doesn’t help that, in the early lives of many Indians, there was a scarcity of goods and it was unacceptable to wait for the right tool to begin a job. In fact, there’s a saying in my native South Indian language Tamil: For a wise man, even a blade of grass is a tool.

Not surprisingly, in my industry (IT), programmers and project managers alike are shy of using rapid application development and other tools that help improve quality and accelerate speed to market of new software. So far, it has been de rigueur to throw warm bodies to achieve these objectives.

Contrast this with a hardcore DIY market like Germany.

I casually asked the landlord of my apartment in Frankfurt if he knew some place where I could buy a used wooden cabinet. He pointed out to an unused IKEA cabinet in his daughter’s apartment and told me that I could take it. I started looking for help to move the cabinet to my apartment situated next door. The 70 year old German looked at me as though as I’d gone crazy.

He told me there was no need for any external help and asked me to fetch a bedsheet. Once I did that, he lifted the legs of the cabinet and placed them over the bedsheet. The two of us were able to easily drag the bedsheet – along with the cabinet on top of it – to my apartment. Mission accomplished! What appeared to be a highly daunting task to me was made so easy by the gentleman who was double my age because he had something that I didn’t possess – a DIY skill that all Germans learn in school.

Near my office just outside Frankfurt, there was an outlet of OBI, a leading home improvement DIY retailer in Germany and rest of Europe. I had a German co-worker who used to visit this German equivalent of Home Depot at least once a week. When I asked him why he went there so frequently, he told me it was to explore new tools for DIY home improvement tasks including carpentry, major repair and minor construction work. Apparently, Germans are taught how to use DIY tools in school.

Let’s look at the future outlook for DIY in India.

I doubt if Indian parents and / or children will be too happy if schools started substituting maths and science subjects with handwork skills. Ditto if schools started supplementing maths and science with handwork skills – and increased the age of graduation by a few years (as it happens in Germany). So we can’t expect Indians to acquire major DIY skills anytime soon in the future.

DIY tools for carpentry*

I notice that Millennials are open to exploring tools. However, they’re still reluctant to undergo formal training on them. Without that, they’ll never become proficient in the proper use of tools.

Ergo, I don’t see India turning into a DIY-land in the forseeable future.

I’m sure IKEA is fully clued in to this reality. Going forward, I expect the furniture retailer to either

  1. Tweak its DIY model so suit Indian consumer behavior, as it has done in the Middle East by offering delivery and assembly service at a nominal cost at its Dubai store from the mid 1990s, or
  2. Sick to its DIY model to drive stickiness, as it has done in Europe and the USA.

While stickiness is important, it follows adoption. If IKEA sticks to its default DIY model in India, it won’t achieve much adoption in the first place, forget about stickiness at a later stage.

For its own sake, I hope that the company chooses the first option in India because IKEA will die before Indians will DIY.

UPDATE DATED 17 AUGUST 2018:

Looks like IKEA has chosen the middleground between DIY and fully-assembled!

* Image credit: VisualHunt