Away from the connected everything of the CES 2019 showfloor, IKEA quietly added two models of smart blinds to its IKEA Germany online store this week.

Connected blinds are unlikely to sell big in isolation, but what the move could mean for IKEA – if it fully recognises the opportunity – is much more interesting than the straightforward smart rollers themselves. In short, it’s now clear that IKEA’s smart-home plans extend far beyond light bulbs and wireless charging lamps.

After years of modest launches, 2019 is on track to be the year that IKEA becomes a major smart-home player by playing to its strengths in brick-and-mortar stores, building online sales and leveraging tech partnerships with the likes of Sonos, Apple and Xiaomi. The real question is: just how aggressive will it be?

This latest product, a pair of €99 smart roller blinds that will go on sale in Germany initially on February 2, cements the blueprint IKEA has followed in smart-home hardware so far. Like its existing TRÅDFRI range of smart light bulbs and smart outlets, KADRILJ and FYRTUR are low-cost, powered by near-invisible tech, offer manual and automated controls and work with all the three main ecosystems: Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple HomeKit.

"We want to be a destination for the complete window,” says Lena Engman, business leader home textiles at IKEA. This formula and messaging could easily expand to the whole smart home if applied to all manner of categories, including kitchen gadgets, home entertainment and even garden accessories.

True to form, IKEA is also highlighting that this is very much a DIY job that could be completed as buyers assemble the rest of their purchases. “It is as simple to install KADRILJ and FYRTUR as all our other blinds,” says Engman. “You can even change from an old HOPPVALS or SKOGSKLÖVER to this one, using the same bracket. This means that the customers can easily install the smart blinds themselves, a unique IKEA property.”

Björn Block, business leader of IKEA Home Smart, confirms that we can expect more connected products through 2019, beginning with the release of the connected blinds “in some markets”. The highest profile product, though, will no doubt be the SYMFONISK connected speaker, in collaboration with Sonos as part of the long-term Future Home Sound project.

First teased in June 2018, SYMFONISK is expected to launch “mid to end of the year in store” and the speaker was carefully designed to fit various pieces of IKEA furniture including the ubiquitous BILLY bookcase. That makes sense in the home but it also gives the retailer an advantage on the shopfloor for a seamless showcase of its home tech range.

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Back in October 2018, research firm CCS Insight predicted that “furniture retailers will become digital home stores” by the end of 2019. It argued that these retailers have the space to stock and display devices in connected home environments and that this could counter the trends of low levels of awareness and understanding of the smart home by the public.

“IKEA is positioning itself as a key enabler in the smart-home space. It’s a go-to retailer for younger, tech-savvy consumers who are a key demographic for smart-home adoption,” says Ben Wood, chief of research at CCS Insight. “Ultimately, IKEA’s core business is all about selling furniture. If adding the smart dimension helps support that it will continue to embrace it with vigour.”

Its high-street competition in this space has so far been small scale and thus underwhelming. In the UK, department store John Lewis is piloting smart-home installations, sponsored by companies including Apple and Google, in stores in London, Southampton, Oxford, Leeds and Edinburgh. “These remain on the electronics floors,” says Wood. “The shift to the soft-furnishings department has to be the next logical step.”

While many furniture stores, interiors publications and Instagram accounts continue to essentially ignore technology in the home -–with the allowance of, say, a single retro DAB radio per photoshoot – IKEA’s brand allows it to lean into innovation. Its IKEA Place ARKit app, which is also now available on androids, had reached 2.2 million downloads by the end of 2018 and an average user rating of 4.7/5 stars. Other experiments include a small-scale test using VR headsets to showcase new kitchen suites at its Vasteras store in Sweden.

It’s unlikely to immediately impact sales, but another secret weapon when it comes to its standing in the design community is Space10, its innovation lab. Space10 partnered with the Design Museum in London on its Home Futures exhibition, which runs until March 24 before it transfers to the IKEA Museum in Älmhult, Sweden. Exhibits include a promo video for a project on co-living in 2030 with design agency Anton + Irene as well as a fictional, futuristic IKEA catalogue, produced in 2007, featuring pieces including holographic furniture.

Despite its built-in shopfloor advantage, the world’s largest furniture retailer hasn’t been immune to global trends in brick-and-mortar retail. According to the Financial Times, IKEA’s sales growth had slowed to two per cent in 2017 compared to an average of seven per cent per year from 2012 to 2017 with profits falling in 2017. IKEA did report that sales growth partially recovered to 4.5 per cent year-on-year in the 12 months to August 2018. In-store sales remained flat (itself remarkable), but online sales grew 31 per cent in the period.

Following this, in November 2018, the Ingka Group announced a shift in IKEA's business strategy with 7,500 jobs at risk of redundancy and the creation of 11,500 new jobs in areas including "digital capabilities" and fulfilment.

Within this context, IKEA's major advantage as a potential force in the burgeoning smart-home industry is the strength of its partnerships with technology companies. It may be treating the Future Home Sound project with Sonos, the fruits of which will become apparent in the second half of 2019, as a test case for further hardware collaborations, but it has been making tentative moves in other directions, too.

Its partnership with Xiaomi, announced in December 2018, could be particularly important here for expanding sales of its smart-home products into Asia. The collaboration means that the TRÅDFRI lighting range is now available in China and is connected to Xiaomi’s Internet of Things platform so that users can control IKEA’s smart light bulbs with Xiaomi’s Xiao AI voice assistant.

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There are more product partnerships on the horizon for 2019, including the FREKVENS speaker series with Teenage Engineering, but ultimately IKEA’s most crucial Silicon Valley partner will most likely be Apple. IKEA has made HomeKit compatibility a priority and in light of Apple’s widely expected focus on its services, together with the the fact that HomeKit still lags behind Alexa and Google Assistant when it comes to third-party compatibility, IKEA finds itself in a position to essentially build out the Apple home for Cupertino.

It’s also worth noting that Apple simply doesn’t produce devices in most of the growing smart-home categories. Once an Apple loyalist has bought an Apple HomePod or two, and perhaps an Apple TV 4K (which is no longer as important after Samsung's of iTunes coming to its TVs), IKEA will be waiting to fill in the gaps as a direct counterpoint to the Amazon Alexa ecosystem. That’s even more useful considering that TRÅDFRI products are able to talk to other brands via the Zigbee protocol – for instance, IKEA’s light bulbs can be added to an existing Philips Hue system in the Hue app itself.

The challenge for IKEA then is that the main criticism of its smart-home efforts, particularly its TRÅDFRI smart-lighting range, so far has been one of performance and reliability. The KADRILJ and FYRTUR smart blinds are, again, on the affordable end, compared to the existing competition such as Velux Active with Netatmo or Lutron’s Serena, and may experience similar teething problems with users.

It needs to continue to refine its connected home tech to ensure the quality and user experience is at least on a par with what existing customers expect from its furniture and homeware. With user reports of buggy software and fiddly hardware within the TRÅDFRI range, IKEA should consider relying on its tech partners even more and at every stage of product development.

IKEA's wireless charging furniture arrived back in 2015 (way before Apple finally came on board with the tech), smart light bulbs in 2017 and connected power outlets in 2018 - a slow sequence of dipping its toes into the waters of building and selling smart-home kit. Now in 2019, the launch of a product like smart blinds will hopefully mean that the floodgates have opened.

Everything is in place to establish itself as the go-to smart-home store of the immediate future. It has the products, it has the retail experience, it has the trust. As a result, it could shape what the smart home means for millions of people. All IKEA needs to do is drop the tentative drip-feed of connected furnishings and fully commit while it's still in such a commanding position.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK