A large crowd turned out in Netanya’s industrial zone Tuesday morning for the opening of European furniture and home design chain Kika’s first store in Israel.Shoppers began to appear at the entrance around 7 a.m., three hours before the ribbon was cut by Kika International CEO Paul Koch and franchisees Salomon Batito, Oren Nussbaum and Motti Sela. The first 100 shoppers who entered the store all received a free footstool.Some 10,000 customers had entered the store by the afternoon, and that figure was expected to double by the 10 p.m. closing time.var ord = window.ord || Math.floor(Math.random() * 1e16);document.write('');With 32 stores in Austria and another 22 spread throughout Central and Eastern Europe, Kika is one of Europe’s leading furniture brands. Its Netanya store, which employs 200 people, will compete with IKEA, which has an outlet in Rishon Lezion. People will learn to distinguish between the two brands and will know what they are coming to Kika for, CEO Koch told business daily Globes at the opening. “Obviously, for every candle they sell, we want to sell more, but we don’t focus on the comparison,” he said, adding that the site was chosen even before IKEA’s Netanya store burned down in February.
