Swedish furniture retailer IKEA is buying 70 acres in Frederickson from
the Port of Tacoma, with plans to build a distribution center that will
serve IKEA stores in Washington, Oregon, Utah and the Canadian
provinces of Alberta and British Columbia.
The Port of Tacoma commission on Tuesday approved the sale of the
property – on the northeast corner of 38th Avenue East and 200th Street
East – to IKEA for $8.66 million.
Derrick Urquhart, the port’s manager of industrial real estate, said
the distribution center will create 150 jobs and drive more imported
cargo through the port. The distribution center also will add some
diversity to the port’s Frederickson Industrial Area, which now houses
mostly manufacturers such as The Boeing Co., Toray Composites of
America and Northwest Door, Urquhart said.
Frederickson’s location was the draw for IKEA.
By Kelly Kearsley
The News Tribune
[via Jen]
In the News
IKEA Tacoma, IKEA Washington, Port of Tacoma
World famous Swedish furniture giant IKEA will not suffer after Thursday
evening’s fire that destroyed one of its four main storage spaces in Gebze, IKEA
Turkey’s general manager Mikael Bartroff told Referans.
IKEA has stock for three to four weeks in their other three storage
spaces apart from Gebze, Bartroff said. “There are 6,500 stocked products and
only 1,000 were destroyed in the Gebze fire. Our suppliers have been informed of
the situation but we don’t expect any supply problems. We have one month of
stocks and if a problem arises with supplies after one month, our customers can
order their products and we will deliver them free of charge to their homes when
they become available”, he added.
Bartroff said the damage caused by the fire was not as high as 10 million
euros as estimated in media reports. He said the real cost of the fire will be
determined after the necessary studies and inspections have been completed.
Sevgi Sayar
Istanbul Daily News
In the News
IKEA Fire, IKEA Turkey
“The 2007 Ikea catalog dropped with a global 80,000-ton thud a few weeks ago. Though its arrival hardly rates on the American cultural calendar, it’s something of a phenomenon in Europe, where shelter catalogs aren’t so plentiful.
Still, publishing 160 million catalogs a year worldwide (20 million in the United States) is a retail achievement nonpareil. By way of comparison, three years after its release, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has about 60 million copies in print.
The catalog is dizzying — its 370 pages the two-dimensional equivalent of the store’s labyrinthine showrooms. But what popped out this year was a page of postage-stamp-size, black-and-white portraits of Ikea’s design team. They were arranged like a school yearbook, 26 of them, their vowel-heavy Swedish names in small red type. On later pages they reappeared individually next to their latest creations.
Was this a subtle allusion to Design Within Reach or a more deliberate poke? Since its debut in
1999, black-and-white portraits of furniture designers have been a hallmark of DWR’s catalog, essential to the way that each object is presented as a work of art…”
Robin Rauzi
LA Times
Photo: Christine Cotter/ LA Times
In the News
DWR, IKEA catalog
