Bazar
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| Private | |
| Industry | Retail |
| Founded | 20 August 1954 |
| Founder | Ingrid Dupont |
| Headquarters | , |
Number of locations | 127 |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people |
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| Products | |
Bazar is a Merovian multinational retail firm specializing in household products including furniture, kitchen appliances, decorations and home renovation products. The company was founded in 1953 by Ingrid Dupont, entrepreneur and heiress to a Peregrine political dynasty, in the city of the Median in southeastern Merovia, growing over the ensuing decades to become the largest furniture retailer in the Merovian Republic and soon spreading to become one of the largest in Belisaria with locations open on all seven continents as of 2018. The name of the company references the bustling marketplaces of the Periclean world, supporting the brand image of Bazar stores as lively places where a wide variety of household goods are sold. Bazar was originally one of several Merovian companies specializing in furniture design, manufacturing and sales, but has since diversified into its current portfolio of more diverse products related to the household and the home including hardware, tools, and gardening materials, acting on the assumption that consumers of furniture are either new homeowners or undertaking renovations on their living space and will most likely be on the market for a wide variety of household goods and materials for renovation and home improvement, increasing the profitability of Bazar retail locations which cater to all of these related demands at once.
History
Products
Furniture
For its first few decades of life as a business, Bazar sold conventional, pre-assembled furniture in a classical Merovian style. This would eventually give way through the company's expansions in the 70s and 80s to the far more modernist design. In 1977, the shift to ready-to-assemble furniture rather than pre-assembled products was undertaken, first as a cost cutting measure as the company transitioned to lower cost manufacturing with cheaper wood products, and then as an intentional part of the Bazar brand which advertised the ease with which flat pack furniture kits could be bought and taken home in a sedan or other family vehicle and even on public transportation compared to bulky traditional furniture pieces. The move to lower cost flat pack furniture has worked well with the company's intended consumer base of new homeowners and renters, typically young people looking to furnish a living space with a limited budget. This has also been marketed as an environmentalist choice by the company in an campaign to give the Bazar brand an environmentally friendly image, arguing that the use of materials such as particle board and other engineered wood materials efficiently makes use of wood byproducts and helps reduce the overall consumption of wood thereby reducing the strain on the woodlands supplying timber in Merovia and beyond.
Design Services
Room Designer
A relatively recent addition to the Bazar business is a design service available through online mediums as well as in person through store employees, intended to help customers find better arrangements and layouts of furniture in their homes. Floor plans provided by video or by diagrams on paper allow Bazar design staff to create an optimized layout using interior design principles and other design philosophies including traditional Ochranian geomancy to create the most comfortable home environment. The room design offering was initially proposed as a complimentary service that would add to the brand and offer an avenue for stores to increase profit by upselling certain less popular products as part of the room design recommendations. However, the service would eventually go live in 2015 as a paid service marketed as a low cost consultancy service for professional and domestic spaces.