Customers like fashion designer Zhan Yan don't totally ignore Ikea. Zhan admitted that she bought a lot of small gadgets from Ikea, especially those for the kitchen, since "they are really good for utilitarian purposes."

This is also the reason that keeps many other customers flocking to the store.

Zhu Shangqi, a mother who teaches music at home, said she goes to Ikea from time to time to check out some new stuff.

Agreed on by many, what customers actually enjoy is the visit to the store itself. The supermarket-like shopping environment has made the store visit more of an outing than a chore. And the bins and shelves constantly hold surprises: Ikea replaces a third of its product line every year.

"It is like a treasure-hunting experience," Zhu said, even after two hours of searching, the only treasure she finds is a 5-yuan (US$60 cents) toilet brush.

Zhu recalled how she first took to Ikea. In 1999, as a newly graduated student she spent her first month's salary on a Billy bookcase. Her assessment of the furniture retailer summed up the appeal of Ikea: "Ikea seems to know my life better than any other furniture brand."

"Ikea listens to its customers," said Amanda Chen, who has been working for Ikea globally for around 12 years and is currently the showroom manager of Ikea Beijing. "We offer solutions to their daily life frustrations."

"It is Ikea's priority to get to know the lives of local people. We need to identify their daily life frustrations so that we can provide products to help solve them, " revealed Chen.

Those daily frustrations are the endless inspiration for their furniture design and arrangement of their room settings, Chen explained.

For the 77 room settings in the new store, Ikea interviewed 1,200 customers, focusing mainly on working mothers, as they make the decisions when it comes purchasing furniture, said Chen.

She also visited 55 homes that contributed to the blue prints for most of the room settings, including the three newly added complete homes. One of her interesting findings from Chinese houses is that "most Chinese kitchens, usually oily, messy and dark, need more improvement than their living rooms and bedrooms."

As a result, the new store has added more kitchen show rooms in their room setting displays.

According to Chen Yue, marketing manager of Ikea Beijing, Ikea's success in China and globally lies in its devotion to good design and dedication to provide innovative solutions.

"People don't purchase Ikea products as a symbol of their social status or their wealth, " said Chen. "Even as popular as it is today, our old customers still come to Ikea because they love it, because we can help make their lives better."

Chen is actually citing Ikea's mantra, " to create a better life for many," the vision of Ikea's founder Ingvar Kamprad, who started the company in 1943 at age 17, first selling pens, Christmas cards, and seeds from a shed on his family's farm in southern Sweden. It has now spread across the world with 230 stores in 33 countries and regions and a planned expansion of more than 100 stores in five years, seven in China.

Despite a vocal minority who rail at Ikea for its long queues, crowded parking lots, exasperating assembly experiences, and furniture that's hardly built for to stand the test of time, there are always those moments for devoted converts, like Zhu. "How can I deal with all this stuff piling up?" Zhu said as she contemplated the purchase of some more storage containers.

(For more biz stories, please visit Industry Updates)