Swedish furniture giant IKEA apologized to Filipino supporters after its registration portal for loyalty club membership crashed following its launch.
IKEA store manager for Southeast Asia Georg Platzer said that they were “both humbled and surprised by the surge of visitors” online and added that they are “very sorry” for the technical issue.
“We are very sorry that we did not anticipate this outpouring of support from the Philippines and so we have been having technical problems with our website,” he said in a Facebook video posted by the home store on Wednesday.
“We were prepared for a total of 120,000 sign ups an hour, but as early as 12 midnight, we already had more than 100,000 accessing the site during the first minute,” Platzer shared.
“Last night was a great learning for us. We have been preparing for the Philippines for a couple of years now and we are continuously learning, and will continuously improve our preparation. Rest assured that our team is hard at work to resolve the issue and the sire will be back up again,” he further said.
Platzer also said that membership in its loyalty club “will remain to be free from today, moving forward to forever” and that it will be for a lifetime.
“It’s not only today. So please stay with us,” he said.
IKEA previously announced that it will open its IKEA Family Club online, a loyalty club that offers members discounted prices, invites to pre-opening events and other rewards and benefits.
100,000 registrants within the first 24 hours of its launch will have a chance to win one out of three IKEA home makeover packages worth P50,000 with exclusive design consultations.
IKEA targets to open its physical store in the Philippines in the fourth quarter of this year at SM Mall of Asia in Pasay.
Its first batch of products already arrived in the country last June.
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IKEA’s Philippine branch is considered to be its biggest one yet.
According to reports, the furniture giant chose the Southeast Asian country to house its largest store due to its growing middle class and booming residential market.
IKEA is a long-running furniture retail company that was founded way back in 1953 in Sweden. It has since established itself as a brand that offers functional and well-designed furniture pieces to its customers across the world.
