is an international home
Furnishings Retailer . It has 231 stores in 33
Countries , most of them in
Europe , the rest in the
United States ,
Canada ,
Asia and
Australia . More than 20 opened during
2005 . IKEA is one of the few store chains to have locations both in
Israel and in other
Middle East ern nations.
IKEA is generally pronounced (
IPA ) but in many English-speaking regions, it is pronounced (IPA ) rhyming with the word "idea".
The IKEA
Catalogue , containing about 12,000 products, is printed in 160 million copies (2006) worldwide, and distributed free of charge. IKEA Q&A section, on the Swedish language site (
{Link without Title} ).
IKEA is famous for its affordable furniture which consumers are required to assemble for themselves.
IKEA was founded in word οικία
{Link without Title} (home) and to the
Finnish word oikea (correct).
Originally, IKEA sold
Pen s,
Wallet s,
Picture Frame s,
Table runners,
Watch es,
Jewelry and
Nylon Stockings or practically anything Kamprad found a need for that he could fill with a product at a reduced price.
Furniture was first added to the IKEA product range in
1947 and, in
1955 , IKEA began to design its own furniture. The company motto is: "Affordable Solutions for Better Living".
At first, Kamprad sold his goods out of his home and by
Mail Order , but eventually a store was opened in the nearby town of
Älmhult . It was also the location for the first IKEA "warehouse" store which came to serve as a model for IKEA establishments elsewhere and on
March 23 ,
1963 , the first store outside Sweden was opened in
Asker , a
Norwegian municipality outside
Oslo . (The store was located in the same building which houses the Bellevue hotel, about two
Km from the present site at Billingstad/Slependen, which opened in
1975 . The store in Asker is currently undergoing a major expansion and remodeling.)
IKEA furniture is well known for its modern (often unusual)
Design . Also, because much of it is
Self-assembly Furniture (also known as "flat-pack"), it is designed to be assembled by the consumer rather than being sold pre-assembled. IKEA claims this permits them to reduce costs and use of packaging by not
Shipping Air —the
Volume of a bookcase, for example, is considerably less if it is shipped unassembled rather than assembled.
IKEA also claims to have pioneered the use of more sustainable approaches to mass
Consumer Culture . Its founder calls it "democratic design," meaning that the company applies an integrated approach to
Manufacturing and
Design (see also
Environmental Design ). Responding to the explosion of human population—and material expectations—in the
20th Century , the company has mastered
Economies Of Scale , capturing material streams and creating manufacturing processes that hold costs and resource use down, such as the extensive use of
Particle Board . The intended result is flexible, adaptable home furnishings, scalable both to larger homes and smaller dwellings.
IKEA has also expanded their product base to include flat-pack houses, in an effort to cut prices involved in a first-time buyer's home. The product, named
BoKlok was launched in Sweden in
1996 in a joint venture with
Skanska . Now working in the Nordic countries and in UK, sites confirmed in
England include London,
Manchester ,
Leeds and
Liverpool . [http://shopping.guardian.co.uk/household/story/0,1587,1403793,00.html]
Every IKEA product is identified by a name, either
Swedish in origin or Swedish-sounding. Most names have an
Etymology regarding their function or appearance
{Link without Title} :
- ''Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs'': Swedish placenames
- ''Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture'': Norwegian placenames
- ''Dining tables and chairs'': Finnish placenames
- ''Bookcase ranges'': Occupations
- ''Bathroom articles'': Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays
- ''Kitchens'': grammatical terms, sometimes also other names
- ''Chairs, desks'': men’s names
- ''Materials, curtains'': women’s names
- ''Garden furniture'': Swedish islands
- ''Carpets'': Danish placenames
- ''Lighting'': terms from music, chemistry, meteorology, measures, weights, seasons, months, days, boats, sailors’ language
- ''Bedlinen, bedcovers, pillows/cushions'': flowers, plants, precious stones
- ''Children’s items'': mammals, birds, adjectives
- ''Curtain accessories'': mathematical and geometrical terms
- ''Kitchen utensils'': foreign words, spices, herbs, fish, mushrooms, fruits or berries, functional descriptions
- ''Boxes, wall decoration, pictures and frames, clocks'': colloquial expressions, also Swedish placenames
For example, ''AKTION'' is a name for a pepper mill, ''DINERA'' for tableware, ''KASSETT'' for media storage. The entire office furniture line is named ''EFFEKTIV''.
Company founder Ingvar Kamprad, who is
Dyslexic , found that naming the furniture with a name, rather than a product code, made the names easier to remember.
IKEA's goals of sustainability and environmental design in their merchandise may be trumped by the impact a new IKEA store can have on a community:
Like all
Big-box Store s, IKEA stores draw consumers from a very large area. Although they were in the
U.S. before the United Kingdom and other European countries, IKEA had very few stores until recently. Because they have few stores, they often drew consumers from out-of-state. The handful of American cities which accepted IKEA stores were delighted by the subsequent surge in
Sales Tax revenue, yet dismayed at the accompanying surge in
Traffic Congestion .
For example, when an IKEA opened in
April 2000 in
Emeryville ,
California , the traffic was so severe that most local
Traffic Light s were rendered useless. Emeryville police were forced to manually direct traffic daily for three months. When an IKEA opened in
Tempe ,
Arizona in
November 2004 , the traffic jams on
Interstate 10 were so severe that the Arizona Department of Public Safety had to close the nearest off-ramp to the store just to spread out the traffic among other nearby off-ramps.
IKEA's most popular store in
Brent Park ,
London frequently has traffic jams on the weekends.
A new store opened in
Edmonton , North London at midnight on
10 February 2005 . It attracted over 6,000 visitors due to huge opening discounts in the first three opening hours and resulted in a number of casualties as people were crushed in the rush to get into the store. The store was closed after only 30 minutes (due to the large number of customers, there were inadequate security staff and police). The store was re-opened at 5pm on
11 February 2005 with no additional incident. One of IKEA's newest stores opened on
1 March 2006 in
West Sacramento without any injuries. IKEA built its store right next to the nearest highway onramp.
In Saudi Arabia
three people were crushed to death in September 2004 when IKEA offered a limited number of $150 vouchers for free.
Minding the above problems, the store at
Atlantic Station in
Atlanta opened on
29 June 2005 with 20 off-duty police officers directing traffic. That store is its first in the
Southeast U.S. , its third-largest in
North America , and the only one to serve
Grits . The first person in line had been there a week.
The
Stoughton ,
Massachusetts store opened on
9 November 2005 . Nearby highways were at a standstill; approaching the store from less than 1 mile took upwards of an hour. IKEA employees indicated that on the first Saturday of operation, the Stoughton store would have sales of $1-1.2M. Over 300,000 visitors were expected on the first weekend of operation.
IKEA was vetoed planning permission for a further store in England in 2004 (to be based in .
{Link without Title}
IKEA's first Michigan store is expected to open June 7th, 2006 in Canton, Michigan
Newer IKEA stores are usually very large blue boxes with few windows. They are often designed around a "one-way" layout which leads customers along "the natural way", a pathway which provides convenient access to all areas of the store. The sequence involves going through furniture showrooms (showroom) and housewares (market-hall) first, then the warehouse where one collects flatpacks for products seen in the showrooms, and then the cashier.
This design is intended to allow customers to encounter products which they might not have thought to look for, however there are 'shortcuts' marked out within the store to allow quicker access for those who do not wish to browse the large array of goods available.
Whilst the original design involved the warehouse on the lower level and the showroom and markethall on the upper, some stores are single-level bungalow-style stores while many U.S. stores place the showroom upstairs and the marketplace and warehouse both downstairs. This is also true for all german IKEA stores. Some stores operate separate additional warehouses for the larger or less popular flatpacks to keep the size of the customer warehouse down (and therefore less daunting) and allow more stock to be kept on-site at any given time. Unfortunately, this occasionally results in customers being unable to find the goods they paid for at the cashier without direction from staff and the impression of
Queueing twice (once at the cashier, once at the external warehouse). However, there are few complaints about being able to collect goods quicker from the customer warehouses.
Many stores include
Restaurant s serving typically
Swedish Food , and beverages such as
Lingonberry juice. The restaurant area is usually the one place in the store where there are large windows. Outside of Scandinavia, these restaurants are sometimes complemented by mini-shops selling Swedish-made, Swedish-style groceries. As would be expected with IKEA, you can buy IKEA's specialities, such as
Swedish Meatballs , in parts (i.e. the ingredients) at these stores and assemble it (that is, simple, straightforward food preparation) at home.
Most IKEA stores also offer an "as-is" area at the end of the warehouse just prior to the cashiers. Returned, damaged and formerly showcased products which are not in "as new" condition are displayed here, and sold with a discount, but also with a "no-returns" policy.
In Hong Kong, where shop space is limited and costly, IKEA has opened four outlets across the city, which are actually part of conveniently located shopping malls. They are relatively tiny, compared to common "large blue box" store design, yet most of them are still in the "one-way" layout. However, the newest outlet in
Telford Plaza does not follow this template, and the three independent floors can be accessed freely from each. Following IKEA tradition, though, the only cashier is located on the lowest floor.
Despite IKEA's Swedish roots, the owner/franchiser of the IKEA concept is a Dutch company, Inter IKEA Systems BV. The operator/franchisee of the majority of the stores worldwide is a separate entity, the IKEA Group, a private group of companies owned by a Dutch charitable foundation.
Of the 231 IKEA stores in 33 countries, 206 are run by the IKEA Group. The remaining 25 stores are run by franchisees outside of the IKEA Group.
{Link without Title}
INGKA Holding BV is the ultimate parent company for all IKEA Group companies, including the industrial group
Swedwood .
INGKA Holding BV is wholly owned by
Stichting INGKA Foundation , which is a foundation registered in the
Netherlands .
This complicated structure is seen by some as an attempt to avoid Sweden's high taxation at the time. Another reason could be to make it difficult to acquire IKEA.
Some criticisms of IKEA:
- IKEA has demolished historic buildings , in at least one case for a parking lot .
- In the 1990s, there were several complaints arising from IKEA's British television Advertising Campaign s:
- ---“Stop being so English”: In which a “Swedish Psychologist ” claims the British are uptight due to their taste in “English” furniture. (complaints were dismissed). {Link without Title}
- ---An advertisement where a Management Consultant suggests how much more furniture a company could buy, if it fired an office worker. (complaints were dismisssed but IKEA voluntarily withdrew the advert) {Link without Title}
- --- A campaign under the slogan, "Just pack up, ship out, find a place of your own. And for all your new things, you know where to come. Make a fresh start," got complaints that it was trivializing Marriage Breakups and showing a homosexual relationship. (complaints were dismissed) {Link without Title}
- ---An advertisement in which a boss tells members of his staff to smell each other's Armpit s.
- Misleading statements in unsolicited promotional materials, such as "reasons to visit your IKEA store, today!" followed by advertisements for several heavily discounted items. Small print reveals the discount is valid from a starting date weeks or even months into the future, and expires 48 hours later.
- Difficulty in following the instructions for product assembly, which rely on pictures only.
IKEA was named one of the 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers in 2004 and 2005 by ''
Working Mothers '' magazine. It also ranked 96 in Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2006.
As pointed out by circuit lecturer
Will Novosedlik , IKEA embodies the principles of
Design Reform begun by
William Morris and
John Ruskin . "Socialistic" in nature, IKEA attempts to elevate public taste by providing quality goods at affordable prices.
- IKEA furniture was parodied in an episode of the US cartoon Futurama where Professor Farnsworth purchases a self-assembly supercollider from πkea (pi-kea), which subsequently explodes. Incidentally, the supercollider is delivered by a robot designed to look like an IKEA TV-stand.
- The IKEA furniture line was satirized in the movie Fight Club , as a fictional "Furnï" store featuring generically designed products lacking soul or substance in the greater context of humanity.
- The interiors of the homes in John Woo's film ' The Killer ' were furnished completely with IKEA items.
- IKEA furniture is described as "semi-disposable Swedish furniture" in Microserfs by author Douglas Coupland .
- IKEA is featured in a song of the same title by folk/rock singer Jonathan Coulton .
- IKEA furniture was heavily featured throughout the recent Swedish film "The Ketchup Effect".
- IKEA was mentioned in an episode of the US sit-com Friends entitled "The One With All The Poker" in 1995:
''Rachel: So basically, you get your ya-yas by taking money from all of your friends.
Ross: Yeah.
Chandler: Yes, and I get my ya-yas from Ikea. You have to put them together yourself, but they cost a little less.''
"(Chandler sits on rich guys couch) Chandler : I-KEA this is comfortable..."
- An IKEA in Stockholm, Sweden was visited on The Amazing Race 6 . A Detour was performed there.
- Kanye West mentions buying a bed from IKEA in the song Last Call
"Kanye: I unpacked all my shit. You know, we went to IKEA, I bought a
bed, I put the bed together myself. I loaded up all my equipment, and
the first beat I made was, uh, 'Heart of the City.' ""
