When I was a kid, the closest IKEA to where I lived was about 2 hours away. It’s hard to imagine that now because they seemed to have popped up anywhere and everywhere, but as a child, going to IKEA was a thrilling, all-day excursion. We would pile in the car and look forward to the meatballs, princess cake and kid stations the store had to offer the entire drive, and then spend the day exhausting ourselves looking at every inch of the store, enjoying a great lunch, and heading home with a car full of exciting treasures and three kids who needed a nap.
There’s no question that IKEA is a special place, but how much do you really know about the Swedish furniture empire? Well, let’s start at the beginning. IKEA was founded by Ingvar Kamprad in 1943, and its name actually came from a combination of the founder’s initials and the farm where he grew up, Elmtaryd, and his home village in Sweden, Agunnaryd. But the business model of IKEA has not always been the same. Apparently, the first “flat-pack” furniture set didn’t come along until 1956, when Gillis Lundgren, a draftsman hired by Kamprad, came up with the idea while trying to fit a wooden table into the trunk of his car by taking the legs off. The first IKEA flat-pack piece sold was the Lovet, a leaf-shaped side table, which was featured in their 1956 catalog.
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One of IKEA’s most successful items of all time is the Billy bookcase, which you might have in your own home right now! 15 of these basic, yet versatile, bookshelves are produced every minute, and over 41 million units of them had been sold by Billy’s 30th anniversary in 2009. If you lined all of those up, the Billys would stretch over 70,000 kilometers long, and I’m sure they’ve sold plenty more in the last 14 years! But alongside the Billy, three of the most successful ranges of IKEA furniture worldwide are Malm, Hemnes and Komplement.
If you don’t speak Swedish, most of the names of IKEA products probably mean nothing to you. They’re just exotic sounding gibberish that you likely avoid saying out loud so as to not embarrass yourself. But one thing that I realized while living in Sweden, and learning as much as I could of the language, is that many of their products are named after exactly what they are. Apparently, Kamprad was dyslexic, so he named his products using proper names and words that would make them easier for him to identify. “IKEA's curtains are given mathematical geometrical terms and bathroom products are named after lakes, rivers and bays,” Ideal Home UK explains.
IKEA furniture is also created in an interesting way, as the company prides itself on being affordable, so their first priority when building a piece is not the exact design, but how the product can be designed to match a set price point. Teams work hard to ensure that there are always affordable options available for everyone, and fancier products can be purchased by those who have a bit more available to spend. IKEA stores have no problem holding their wide variety of products though, as the average store is 300,000 square feet (or 27,870 square meters). The largest IKEA in the world, however, which opened in the Philippines in 2021, boasts an impressive 700,000 square foot facility (or 65,032 square meters).
IKEA may be a Swedish company, but it has certainly taken over the global market when it comes to affordable furniture and home goods. According to their own website, IKEA has 460 stores worldwide in 62 markets. There are 277 in Europe, 79 in Asia, 71 in North America, 17 in the Middle East, 11 in Oceania, 3 in Africa and 2 in South America. There is even an IKEA Museum in Älmhult, Sweden, where the very first store opened up.
“At IKEA Museum, we tell the story of how the entrepreneur Ingvar Kamprad started IKEA and, with his colleagues, decided to create a better everyday life for the many people,” the museum’s site explains. “Perhaps a meeting-place is a better way to describe us, than a museum. An inspiring, inclusive place for everyone who wants to get to know us. Because we really do want to share all our stories, from the mistakes to the successes.”
Despite how much the world loves IKEA, however, no corporation is perfect, including this Scandinavian gem. And one of many customers’ least favorite things about the store is the fact that their furniture is so hard to assemble. Okay, we might not be allowed to consider that a flaw, because if you want pre-built furniture delivered straight to your home, you can pay much more money to have it. But it always seems like even the simplest pieces from IKEA require an engineering degree to complete. And as it turns out, the company might even be trying to get us more attached to our IKEA furniture by building it ourselves. “The value of the item is increased when the buyer feels like they had a part in creating it,” Oliver Thompson writes in a piece on IKEA furniture in Transforming the Nation. “This leads to a greater connection between customers and the products they buy.”
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“This DIY design philosophy and the affordability of their products means that many people find themselves struggling with flat-pack items they thought would be as easy to assemble as they were to buy,” Thompson goes on to explain. “This way of involving customers in the creation of the product is great on paper, but what it really means is a lot of people who end up pulling their hair out trying to do it themselves.”
“Simply unpacking and organizing the components presents a daunting task for many people. Flat pack items come packaged in a lot of different parts that need careful assembly later,” he writes. “Opening the pack and laying out the pieces takes up a lot of space in people’s homes and makes them think the job will take a lot longer than they want it to. It can also make it easy to lose track of small pieces that there is usually not any spares of.”
