Chef Ivlev Closes Ivlevchef Home by Kitchen
By the beginning of April, the IVlevchef Home by Kitchen house will stop working, the creation of which was participated in the famous chef and TV presenter Konstantin Ivlev. Such projects could become an alternative to foreign brands that have left Russia, but, according to the expert, local retailers do not always see opportunities in the scale of business. In addition, it is increasingly difficult for them to compete with online growth, where they manage to optimize pricing.
The fact that the chain of stores of goods for the home Ivlevchef Home by Kitchen has stopped its work from April 2025, says the Retail officer. The network was created almost a year and a half ago as a joint project of the chef and TV presenter Konstantin Ivlev and the manufacturer of dishes and textiles for the house of By. Then the first branded store with an area of 200 square meters opened. m on the site of the former Zara Men retail point in the Moscow shopping center « Afimall » (see “Kommersant” dated October 12, 2022). Now the company has only six stores, five of which are in Moscow, one in Yekaterinburg.
“A mutual decision was made by BY and Konstantin Ivlev as the holder of the Ivlevchef trademark, to close stores and stop the production of products under a single brand,” said Kommersant, a representative of the Ivlev Group management company.
However, according to him, Mr. Ivlev plans to develop his brand further. The new project under the Ivlevchef brand may be presented in the fall of 2025, and the representative of the chef is not excluded.
The reason for the closure of stores could be problems with building the brand concept, said Nadezhda Tsvetkova, head of the rental department of retail premises of the Core.xp consulting company. “IVLEV Group positioned its goods as a premium segment, while buyers perceived it as democratic, so consumer expectations dispersed with reality,” the expert adds.
The managing partner of Vanchugov and Partners, Alexei Vanchugov, notes that the situation when the retailer overestimates the value of the Celebriti brand is quite common. Often, he continues, it seems to entrepreneurs that it is enough to “stand under the umbrella” of an authoritative expert of the industry, but the buyer himself is more interested in the assortment and quality of products than the person representing it.
Ivlevchef Home by Kitchen was created at a time when specialized Western retailers, including the Swedish IKEA, left the Russian market due to military conflict in Ukraine.
But, as the experience of cooperation by Konstantin Ivlev and BY shows, such projects have not yet been able to become an alternative to the departed foreign brands, despite the capabilities and freed niches.
The problem of this segment is that retailers quickly abandon the idea of scaling a business if the desired sales results are not achieved in a short time, said Vladimir Chernus, head of the IBC Real Estate consulting company.
Small players without a strong procurement competence and the total scale of sales can no longer compete with online cars and DIY-vertheilers who significantly increased the number of proposals in this segment, adds the general director of Infoline Analytics Mikhail Burmistrov. According to the Association of Internet trade companies, online is the category of goods and furniture for the home in second place in popularity among consumers.
According to IBC REAL ESTATE, 40% of the total online DIY-Tovar market is on marketplaces. Online platforms are also developing their own commodity brands, such as Ozon Home, Razz from Wildberries, Pragma from Yandex Market. But the main channel of implementation in the segment is still an offline rosetic, emphasizes Mr. Blink. Despite the fact that a lot of brands for home goods appeared on the market, the market cannot be called oversaturated and the demand for this category is always high, Aleksey Vanchugov concludes.
