Retail giant Ikea announced last week it was acquiring one of the original and best known gig economy companies, TaskRabbit.
About 60,000 independent workers - called Taskers - use the TaskRabbit platform and do everything from handymen chores to cooking to yes, assembling Ikea furniture.
For Ikea, TaskRabbit provides a way to add services to their portfolio. Retail is changing and Ikea is facing greatly increased competition from online retailers, especially Amazon.
It also provides Ikea access to TaskRabbit's extensive digital expertise and an easily expandable platform for finding and engaging independent workers. Key quote from the deal press release:
"We will be able to learn from TaskRabbit's digital expertise, while also providing IKEA customers additional ways to access flexible and affordable service solutions to meet the needs of today's customer," said Jesper Brodin, president and CEO of IKEA Group, in a press release.
As anyone who has put together furniture purchased from Ikea knows, it's not easy (see picture above). Making it easy and relatively inexpensive to hire someone to do this clearly is a good idea.
But to do this, Ikea needs independent workers. Trying to accomplish this with traditional employees would be challenging both logistically and economically. Acquiring TaskRabbit gives them a scaleable platform that solves these problems.
At a broader level this acquisition shows the growing role the gig economy is playing. Large corporations are embracing the gig economy both in terms of hiring gig workers internally as well as developing services and business models based on independent talent.
We expect this trend to continue.
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