IKEA: Logistics for 10,000 Products, From a Candle to a Kitchen

In this episode of Rozmowy Logistyków, Piotr Skobało talks with Sebastian Kaczmarski, Country Customer Fulfilment Manager & Managing Director of IKEA Distribution Services in Poland, about managing logistics for one of the largest retail networks in the world — from how the warehouses run, through inventory planning, to last-mile delivery to the customer's home.

THE HARDEST PROBLEM ISN'T A SINGLE PRODUCT — IT'S THE MIX WITHIN ONE ORDER

IKEA sells around 10,000-11,000 different articles in Poland. Large-format items alone, or courier shipments alone, are relatively simple to ship, according to Kaczmarski — the real challenge starts when a customer adds accessories to a wardrobe order. That's when packing and distribution require the most operational "gymnastics." As a rule the whole order ships together, but if an accessory is out of stock for a larger order, IKEA sends it separately by courier — the priority is a complete order at the customer's end, not minimizing the number of shipments. Exactly how to structure this is a decision each country makes for itself, based on its knowledge of the local market and customer.

WHY THE MOST EXPERIENCED PEOPLE WORK LOADING, NOT PICKING

Kaczmarski joined IKEA almost 10 years ago as a site/contract manager at the central warehouse in Jarosty, coming from a logistics operator where the most experienced staff drove reach trucks. At IKEA he heard the opposite — the best people work loading. The reason: flat-pack furniture varies in width, length, and height, and there are dozens of possible combinations on a trailer. Solving that "Tetris" to optimize space and minimize damage takes the most experienced crew. He also sees this as one of the reasons the flat-pack concept — designed from the ground up for logistics — keeps getting copied by competitors, with less success.

FROM A FEW PERCENT TO NEARLY 40% ONLINE SALES IN A DECADE

When Kaczmarski joined IKEA, online sales were in the low single digits; today they're close to 40%. The company started building real e-commerce scale in 2018, opening a tender for an external courier-fulfillment warehouse to handle around 7,000 of the 10,000-11,000 articles. Despite receiving the same input data, the invited operators proposed completely different process concepts — shuttle systems, AMR robots, a fully manual process, a sorter for splitting completed orders. Unlike fashion, where e-commerce warehouse logic is fairly standardized today, there's simply no such standard for furniture. IKEA now ships more than 3 million courier orders a year in Poland, and the Polish market's e-commerce share outpaces most of Europe — trailing only the UK in the region.

FOUR INVENTORY TIERS, AND A VMI MODEL KACZMARSKI KNOWS FROM THE OTHER SIDE

IKEA's inventory is split into four criticality tiers. At the top are articles that must always be in stock — not thousands, but "closer to a hundred than a thousand" items, like a kitchen-cabinet hinge: without it, you can't sell the whole kitchen, so for items like that a longer, more expensive stock buffer is accepted. IKEA still runs a vendor-managed inventory (VMI) model with a handful of key suppliers — a model Kaczmarski knows from both sides, because 20 years ago, working for Whirlpool, he was personally responsible for keeping 100-150 units of a given model in stock at IKEA's warehouse. Poland is today IKEA's second-largest supplier country globally by value, right after China, and the largest by cubic-meter volume — because furniture and mattresses are made locally, while China supplies more small items. That translates into a shorter, more flexible supply chain for a large share of the assortment.

THE CENTRAL WAREHOUSE GIVES REACH, THE STORE GIVES SPEED

E-commerce in Poland is fulfilled from both central warehouses (one dedicated to courier shipments, one near Warsaw shipping large furniture on pallets straight to the customer) and from stores. Stores, as Kaczmarski notes, sit today in "super locations" — close to major urban centers and to the customer — which allows for cheaper delivery within their own geographic radius. The central warehouse, by contrast, has the broadest reach: it serves every postal code in Poland. Inventory is split between the two nodes to keep flexibility where it's most needed, with prioritization handled by the replenishment team.

PRECISION MATTERS MORE THAN SPEED — BUT ONLY FOR FURNITURE

For courier and parcel-locker shipments, the market has forced a hard standard: 24-hour delivery, free — an expectation shaped by Polish online marketplaces. For large furniture it's different: customers can schedule delivery up to 90 days in advance, and statistically most choose a window 5-7 days out; smaller furniture has a standard two-day lead time, with in-store pickup available within 24 hours for anyone in a hurry. Kaczmarski sees a clear market trend: expedited delivery or a narrow delivery window is increasingly a paid add-on (in the range of 10-20 PLN), as the market moves past its COVID-era race toward "fastest and free" and toward cost discipline. Stated willingness to pay extra for "sustainable" delivery (e.g. electric vans) turned out to be close to zero in real-basket tests — a pattern confirmed independently in a different product category.

AI: A TOOL FOR ORDER ORCHESTRATION, NOT A REVOLUTION — YET

In logistics, IKEA is testing AI in two areas: a tool for optimizing flows and inventory (pilots in Portugal and Spain, with early results showing savings in the low single digits) and an order-orchestration tool already live in Poland, which has replaced a rigid legacy algorithm deciding whether an e-commerce order goes to the central warehouse or a store — today it factors in more variables: activity peaks, stock levels, and planned commercial campaigns. Kaczmarski also cites an example from an external logistics partner that, working with Google, tested AI-driven pick-path optimization and achieved roughly 10% savings in picking time. He cautions, though, that AI adoption in Poland still lags the rest of Europe — today it's mostly incremental improvements built on language models, not full-scale deployment across the business.

ADVICE FOR YOUNG LOGISTICS PROFESSIONALS

Asked what skills are worth developing to eventually run a large logistics organization, Kaczmarski points to three areas: analytical thinking and comfort working with data (without it, logistics can run, but not optimally); openness to new technology — because logistics teams are increasingly the ones pushing the innovation agenda inside organizations, not just executing it; and a customer-focused lens that goes beyond picking, packing, and moving from A to B. His own title, Customer Fulfilment Manager, reflects that shift — alongside cost and productivity, he's now also accountable for metrics like NPS and Happy Customer Score.