Tom Wood
IKEA products all seem to have strange names in Swedish, but it’s more than just a quirky trait, it turns out. The below video will go some way to helping you understand exactly what the idea at IKEA is:
IKEA is great because it offers a relatively inexpensive and easily accessible way to kit out your home, even if you do have to do a lot of the assembly yourself.
However, physical exercise and swearing have been proven to be beneficial to health in some cases, relieving stress and keeping your heart beating.
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So, while you’re assembling your chest of drawers that seem to bear a strange Swedish name - to those of us not from Sweden, anyway - you might be wondering about how they ended up being so.
The truth is that there is a serious piece of method to the perceived madness, as TikTok educator Dougie Sharpe tells us in the video.
It’s all because the creator of IKEA was dyslexic and wanted to have a way to better understand his inventory that made it easier for him to identify what he wanted.
Ingvar Kamprad used different elements of his homeland to differentiate between the things he was selling.
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That means that whenever you pick up something like a sofa, bookshelves, media storage, or doorknobs – we didn’t say it was an easy system – then it’ll be named after somewhere in Sweden.
Other items such as beds and wardrobes bear the names of places in Norway, and carpets are named after places in Denmark.
Dining equipment – tables and chairs – are place names from Finland.
Then, it gets even stranger.
Some items are named after lakes and rivers in Sweden – fittingly bathroom stuff - while others are named after occupations like peasant farmer.
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It goes on like this, with different classifications of things IKEA sell named after people, animals, and adjectives.
As the so called ‘fact man’ in the video explains, there are exceptions to the rule but that doesn’t change the basic idea of how things are named at IKEA.
Kamprad himself was quite the entrepreneur, starting businesses in childhood before founding IKEA in 1943 at the age of 17.
The name of IKEA is made up of the initials of his name IK, as well as the farm he grew up on Elmtaryd for the E, and the village that he was raised in Agunnaryd, representing the A.
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He stayed at the top end of the company until he was replaced by his son in 2013, citing it being a ‘good time’ to do so, as well as heralding a ‘generation shift’ in the business.
To be fair, he’d made a fortune of billions by that stage, at one stage making him the eighth richest person in the world, according to Forbes.
He died in January 2018 at the age of 91.