IKEA HEMSÄKER
Designing IKEA's First Insurance Product
Turning brand equity into a scalable product system
Client: IKEA (Swiss Re iptiQ & Ikano Bank)
Sector: Retail, Consumer Goods, Financial Services
Role: Director of Product and Customer Experience Design (C Space London)
Singapore & Malaysia's digital campaign by TBWA\Singapore)
Singapore & Malaysia's digital campaign by TBWA\Singapore
Reached
10%
of Swiss households in year one
Ranked
top-5 CSAT
in Swiss home insurance
CHF 20 voucher loop drove
5x
uplift in in-store spend
Launched in
4 markets
Switzerland, Malaysia, Singapore, Mexico
Situation
IKEA had trust. Insurance had none. The brief was to design something people would actually trust.
IKEA wanted to move into home insurance. For a brand built on trust, affordability, and making everyday life better, that meant the product had to feel like IKEA, not like insurance.
The category had a loyalty problem long before anyone designed anything. People found it confusing, expensive, and built to resist rather than help. Claiming felt like a fight. Onboarding felt like a trap. Trust, the thing IKEA had spent decades earning, was precisely what the insurance industry had spent decades losing.
They came to C Space, where I was customer experience design director, because we had been running IKEA's Life at Home research programme for years. That body of work, built from tens of thousands of consumers across multiple markets, already showed that security was the top of the five core home needs, rated important or very important by 90% of respondents. It also showed that existing insurance was widely experienced as confusing, expensive, and built for the provider rather than the person. 82% of people surveyed across Germany, Malaysia, and the US said they wanted something simpler and more affordable.
The brief was not to design insurance. It was to design something people would actually trust.
Approach
3-day hackathon. 300+ users tested overnight. 4 propositions in 3 months.
We started by synthesising IKEA's Life at Home research and combining it with a 3-day hackathon in Switzerland. 30 Swiss consumers joined my multidisciplinary team alongside IKEA, Ikano Bank, and Swiss Re executives. 20 to 30 ideas were generated in the first session. Overnight, propositions were sense-checked with more than 300 users across three continents. By day three, four concepts had been developed, tested, and refined. The final proposition and its playbook to scale were ready in 3 months.
The research was doing two things at once. On the brand experience side, it was testing whether IKEA's plain language and democratic ethos could translate into regulated financial language without losing the brand's value. On the customer experience side, it was mapping what people actually needed from insurance and where the current experience broke down: fear of missing something important, distrust at the point of claiming, and the sense that the product was built to resist rather than help.
Four emotional drivers emerged: safety, sustainability, shared living, and affordability. Each became the foundation for a distinct proposition. The service design work translated those drivers into something buildable, end-to-end journeys with compliance logic, operational flows, and launch assets developed in parallel, not added after the fact.
System
Go-to-market propositions. 1 modular playbook. 1 loyalty mechanic that sent people back to the store.
The four propositions are each anchored to one of those emotional drivers. HEMTRYGG was simple and affordable, built for people who wanted to understand exactly what they were buying. HEMFLEX addressed shared living, letting flatmates or partners split the cost. HEMSPAR rewarded sustainable behaviour with incentives for eco-conscious choices. HEMSMART used home scanning to generate instant quotes and a basic safety assessment.
Each was prototyped fully: user flows, service rules, marketing language, and launch assets. The modular playbook that underpinned all four codified tone, journey structure, and compliance parameters so that future markets could adapt the offer without starting from scratch.
The product that launched, HEMSÄKER, took HEMTRYGG as its foundation. The loyalty mechanic was elegantly simple: every claim-free year returned a CHF 20 IKEA voucher to the customer. In practice, that voucher drove an average of 5x its face value in store spend. The brand's home association worked in its favour.
Ingka Group, the largest IKEA franchisee, subsequently embedded the model into its broader financial services strategy.
Some storyboards, use cases, user flows, concepts sketched live during the co-creation hackathon
Summary of one of the product's value proposition concepts
We explored and prototyped four experience-driven product experiences aligned to different life needs:
HEMFLEX – A shared insurance plan for roommates and friends
HEMSMART – Scan your home to get an instant quote and safety score
HEMSPAR – Eco-friendly insurance that rewards sustainable behaviour
HEMTRYGG – Simple, low-cost coverage with clear terms
Outcomes
Experience Systems turned a regulated market entry into a replicable model.
Experience Systems is what turned a market entry into a replicable model. Brand experience anchored the product in IKEA's identity. Customer experience converted research into propositions people actually wanted. Service design gave it the operational logic to launch, localise, and grow.
- 10% direct market share in Switzerland, year one
- Top-5 CSAT rating, Swiss home insurance
- 5x average in-store spend per claim-free year via CHF 20 voucher
- Launched across 4 markets: Switzerland, Malaysia, Singapore, Mexico
- Adopted by Ingka Group as part of IKEA's financial services roadmap
IKEA CH: HEMSÄKER
Ikano Group: Press page
iptiQ Swiss Re: Press page
“We’re really proud of how it reflects the IKEA look and feel. It uses straight-talking language and connects naturally to the brand in a way customers understand and trust.”
Elizabeth Wesson
Digital Strategy,
Swiss Re
Curious how this approach might apply in your context?
Ale
Chief Experience & Design Officer
Design is an act of attention.
For the people. For the business. For the system that connects them.
Based in London
Open to relocation across UK and EU
Fractional, Interim, Permanent