IKEA believes that its stores are not the only space where the brand’s houseware goods can be showcased and often takes them to city streets, opera or underground to demonstrate that IKEA goods perfectly fit any settings and can create proper atmosphere anywhere. Now, the international furniture retailer has come to a metro station in Paris again to promote its items with a new twist: the brand is not just exposing sofas and bookcases—it got five Parisians to spend almost a week in a small apartment fully furnished with IKEA pieces. The new live installation, which is developed by the UBI BENE agency, is currently on display in the Auber metro station.

Starbucks has finally introduced My Starbucks Rewards in the UK and Ireland after launching it in the USA and Canada. Now, British consumers can get rewards by spending money loaded on their registered Starbucks cards, no matter what and when they buy in the chain’s stores. The new service kicked off yesterday, January 5, providing more Starbucks coffee drinkers with an opportunity to receive benefits by collecting stars with purchases they make using their Starbucks Cards.

Today, shoppers want sellers to be extremely inventive offering them the new products and services, and sellers really have a lot of resources to satisfy this quench for sophisticated approaches. Now, when digital is on the rise, brands often choose virtual space to get engaged with their consumers through various hubs and applications, primarily Facebook, iPhone or iPad ones. Zappos also followed the trend—the online show and apparel retailer, has released an iPad app entitled ‘Zappos Now’ (or ZN for short), in which an online store got merged with a digital fashion magazine.

The opera stage seems to be the last place where one would expect to see IKEA furniture, still it’s exactly where it recently appeared. The furniture pieces from the Swedish retailer were used for stage design of two classic operas, which are not related to either to modern house design or the history of furniture in any way. The brand, which likes to experiment with colours and forms, now has entered a new universe, the opera one, by contributing to the settings of the operas at Teatro Carlo Felice, Genoa.