New $4.5M IKEA is a bite-sized first for South Texas. Here’s who we saw.

The first item purchased at the very first IKEA store to open in the Rio Grande Valley was a ginormous teddy bear called Djungelskog, and it was purchased by an IKEA superfan who was among the first people to get in line hours before the store’s opening.

“I came specifically at 7 o’clock this morning. I was 20th in line. Yes, I was,” Star Davila, of McAllen, said as she stood surrounded by dozens of soft, squeezable teddy bear, bumble bee and shark plushies in the toy section of IKEA McAllen Pharr. “And I called off work and I came specifically for this bear because I’ve been waiting two years for it.”

Davila’s two-year wait for the large brown bear paid off as she became the first person to make a purchase at the new IKEA, which welcomed customers to much fanfare and mariachi music during a grand opening ceremony on Wednesday, October 1.

The store, located at 500 N. Jackson Road in Pharr as part of the Pharr Town Center shopping plaza, is a so-called “small format” store design that the Swedish home decor company has recently launched in several new locations across Texas. The Pharr store, which spans just over 44,100 square feet, is the company’s first foray into the Rio Grande Valley.

Company officials say the miniature footprint of a small-format store — which is just a fraction of the 300,000 to 450,000 square feet of a full-sized store — allows IKEA to be more nimble when it comes to setting up shop in places where they’ve never been before but where there’s palpable demand. That includes the Valley, which is located about 230 miles south of San Antonio and 350 miles south of Houston. The region, which includes the northern Mexican cities that lie just across the Rio Grande, boasts a combined population of about 3 million people.

“By shrinking our size but still offering the full product range to the customer, we’re able to get to the smaller communities with all of our great products,” said Keena Garcia, IKEA’s market manager for the San Antonio region, which now also includes the Valley.

The $4.5 million project marks the fourth IKEA “unit” to open in Texas this year, and joins six existing stores, three “plan and order points” and two more stores in the works for Rockwall and Dallas, the company said in a news release.

“We looked for areas that wanted us to be here, and we have a lot of customers that drive all the way to San Antonio — three-and-a-half hours — so, it was really a really easy switch to be able to say this is where they need us to be,” Garcia said.

Garcia wasn’t wrong. MySA spoke with several people who, along with about a thousand other customers, had lined up in a snaking queue before dawn, hours ahead of the IKEA store’s 10 a.m. opening. That included Davila, who joined the line at 7 a.m., then stayed put, even after realizing she’d accidentally left her water bottle and blanket in her vehicle. But she dared not retrieve them for fear of losing her place in line, she said.

Davila was joined at the grand opening by her friend, Luna Garcia — who chose a small Skogsduva bumble bee plush as her first purchase — and her mom, Tessy. The pair described themselves as big IKEA fans, with Luna explaining how much of the furniture in her bedroom is from IKEA, including an IKEA bed that took two years and several trips to faraway stores, like San Antonio, Austin and Dallas, to find. The Garcias were ecstatic to now have a local location. And like Davila, they made sure to make time for Wednesday’s grand opening.

“I actually took the day off of work to be here today. Truly, I did, because I love IKEA,” Tessy Garcia said. “I just love that it’s here close to us. It’s convenient for us. And it has just about everything we need,” she added a moment later.

Another family traveled all the way from Brownsville just for the occasion. Denise Gallegos and Elliott Quezada brought their 8-year-old son, Elden, a connoisseur of IKEA’s signature Swedish meatballs. The family said they made a similar trek in July, when IKEA opened a location in San Marcos.

“They’re very tasty, and most of the stuff is pretty high-quality. Half of my house is IKEA,” young Elden said.