Owner Manager

Assembly business launched as IKEA opens doors

27.07.2009
The opening of IKEA on Dublin’s Northside today has already resulted in at least one new feeder business being set up to tap into the huge traffic expected at the store. Provocatively called SimpleAssemblyMeHole.com, it's a novel idea, offering delivery, furniture assembly and kitchen installation.

Owner manager of Brightspark Consulting, an internet marketing company set up in 2003, Maryrose Lyons (pictured) is the woman behind the venture, who expects the 21 carpenters, fitters and tradesmen she has signed up to be doing 12-hour days, six days a week to meet the demand.

She says the name is intended to be tongue in cheek. “When researching the idea I started a discussion on Facebook about it. I had hoped to get IKEA name into the url as this would help the Google ranking, but I didn’t want to infringe the trademark. I got the idea for the name when I told a friend the business was about simple assembly of discount furniture and he replied, “Simple assembly me hole!”, and that was it.

“I did a soft launch last Thursday on Twitter and got a great response to it, so from a marketing point of view that worked well.”

Lyons expects the people who will be most interested in the services to be “definitely younger, maybe with negative equity, so they’re stuck in their houses and decide to update their furniture.

“These people don’t want to spend eight hours fighting while they put it together. One of the comments I got on Twitter was that furniture assembly should be included in pre-marriage courses!” she says.

Furniture assembly costs €30 per item. You pay with Paypal and once SimpleAssemblyMeHole.com gets notification of this online, a tradesperson close to you is assigned the job, which Lyons says will be done within the next day.

She has vetted all 21 of the people on board, who have the flexibility of juggling the assignments with their own businesses. “These people were working around the clock during the boom and they’re now underemployed and dying to be in business. We use Google Calendars to keep track of everything – if they’re on another job they just mark themselves as unavailable.”

Kitchen installations are priced at 15pc of the cost of the kitchen and the site promises to handle deliveries in less than 24 hours.

Lyons says she wants to remain independent but would love to build a “strong relationship” with IKEA in the future. People have been queuing outside IKEA since yesterday in the hopes of getting some bargains, and the store promises some prices will be lower than in its Belfast store.

By Sorcha Corcoran