Walk into a Best Buy later this year and, amid the rows of refrigerators and smart-home displays, you might stumble into a tidy 1,000-square-foot IKEA planning studio. It won’t be the full maze of flat-pack showrooms most of us picture—no checkout towers of Billy bookcases blocking the path—but it will be a staffed mini showroom where you can sit down with an IKEA planner, map out a kitchen or laundry layout, and order products for delivery or pick-up. The pilot, which launches this fall across ten Best Buy stores in Florida and Texas, marks the first time IKEA is making its products and services available through another U.S. retailer.

These “shop-in-shop” planning centers are modest by IKEA standards—about 1,000 sq. ft.—and are explicitly designed to complement Best Buy’s appliance business rather than compete with it. The concept is straightforward: customers shopping for an oven or washer at Best Buy can be nudged into thinking about the cabinetry, counters and storage that will surround that appliance, and get help from IKEA staff on how to make it all fit. You won’t be walking out with a flat-pack bookcase under your arm; instead, you can design, plan and place orders with an IKEA representative, who can arrange delivery or collection.

The pilot will land in ten Best Buy stores concentrated in Florida and Texas. Reporting and the companies’ own materials list Florida locations such as Boynton Beach, Daytona Beach, Lakeland, Melbourne and Waterford Lakes; Texas locations include Alamo Ranch (San Antonio), Hulen (Fort Worth), Humble, Mesquite and South Austin. Two of those sites—Alamo Ranch and Lakeland—will also serve as pickup hubs for most IKEA orders placed through the in-store studios.

For IKEA, the move is a fairly elegant way to increase U.S. reach without building another giant blue box. The Swedish retailer still operates a relatively small network of large-format stores across a vast country: as of early 2025, IKEA’s U.S. footprint sat in the low-50s of locations, with many Americans still hours from a full store. Plugging into Best Buy’s dense network—more than a thousand locations nationwide—gives IKEA access to customers in markets where opening a new IKEA would be costly or slow.

Best Buy gets something it needs, too: inspiration. Appliance margins and big-ticket electronics remain central to the chain, but over the past few years, retailers have been trying to convert browsing into higher-value, planned projects (kitchens, laundry remodels, whole-home tech installs). An IKEA planning center gives Best Buy a partner that can steer an appliance purchase toward a broader room refresh—potentially boosting basket size, installation services and cross-category sales. The companies framed the collaboration as a “one-stop destination” melding IKEA’s design and furnishing expertise with Best Buy’s appliance and tech leadership.

This kind of pairing is hardly new. Retailers have leaned on brand partnerships to inject specialty traffic—or to fill empty square footage—before. Think Ulta’s beauty shops inside Target stores or Sephora at Kohl’s: both were designed to bring specialist merchandise and expertise into a generalist store, and both deepened the reach of the specialty brands while driving incremental foot traffic and sales for the host. The early returns on those tie-ups have been mixed and sometimes paused or adjusted, but the strategy is established—and IKEA-Best Buy follows that playbook in a way that makes sense on paper.

If you visit one of the launch stores this fall, expect a compact vignette or two—kitchen and laundry room mockups with appliances integrated into the display—plus a staffed planning desk. You’ll be able to see how a particular fridge sits with cabinet door styles, where a washer would fit next to built-in storage, and get help ordering the furniture, fronts, fittings and accessories you need. In the two pickup locations, you may be able to collect some items the same day; elsewhere IKEA will likely move orders through its usual delivery and fulfillment channels.

The idea is tidy, but execution will matter. Inventory and fulfillment are complex for a company that sells flat-pack furniture at scale; integrating those systems with a third party’s stores adds layers of logistics and customer-service expectations. Brand fit is another consideration: IKEA’s casual, hands-on discovery experience is different from Best Buy’s fast, appliance-first layout—will the planning centers feel like an authentic micro-IKEA or an awkward annex? And from a corporate view, there’s always the danger that one brand dilutes the other if customers perceive a mismatch in price, quality or service. Early pilots will reveal whether the benefits outweigh those frictions.

If the pilot drives measurable lifts in kitchen and appliance projects—or if it meaningfully increases IKEA’s reach at low cost—there’s no reason to think this stays small. The model is attractive for retailers with large footprints and underused square footage. On the other hand, if the pilot struggles with logistics, confusing customer journeys, or cannibalization of IKEA’s own stores, it may remain a niche experiment. Either way, it’s a clear signal that large retailers are still experimenting with new ways to stitch discovery, inspiration and purchase together in an era where online browsing and in-store conversion are both essential.

The IKEA-Best Buy partnership is clever, compact and deliberately limited for now: ten stores, focused displays, a clear angle (kitchens and laundry). For shoppers, it means a slightly easier path from seeing an appliance to imagining the room around it—without driving to a distant IKEA. For the two companies, it’s a test of whether cross-retailer collaboration can actually move the needle on bigger projects that typically begin with online browsing and end in multiple store visits. Keep an eye on fall 2025—if the pilot works, those tidy 1,000-sq.-ft. studios could start popping up wherever large appliances and tight budgets meet.