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A flexible failure

IKEA has always tried to find new, smarter ways of packing and distributing furniture. At the end of the 1970s, IKEA took inspiration from car seating in its attempts to pack sofas and armchairs into flat packs.

A foul-smelling fiasco

In the late 1980s the green movement was really taking off, and more and more people were composting their waste at home in the garden. But hardly anyone had ever tried composting indoors – and IKEA wanted to change that.

An inflatable story

In the mid-1990s, Swedish furniture designer Jan Dranger came to IKEA with a revolutionary suggestion. He thought he had the solution to one of Ingvar Kamprad’s biggest challenges: how to pack sofas and easy chairs into flat packs.

Is it possible to dye trees while they’re growing? IKEA veteran Jan Ahlsén asked this question and tried to find the answer in the 1990s. Helping him were an inventor in Sweden and a Swedish forester in Laos. Here, we tell the whole fascinating story.

Cushion filling in a tube

In the 1980s, designer Gillis Lundgren came up with an ingenious idea that would save space and costs when transporting cushions. Working with chemists, IKEA would develop a new type of expanding insulation material that could quickly grow to 35 times its original size. This would enable customers to fill everything from scatter cushions to sofa cushions with soft padding.

The legend of the missing screw in IKEA flatpacks has existed since the 1960s, when IKEA began expanding dramatically. The logistics were not always up to scratch on the packaging lines, and sometimes an important component was missing from the little bag of screws, nuts and Allen key.

Ingvar Kamprad loved mistakes, as long as you learnt something and didn’t make them again. “It must be allowed to make mistakes. It is always the mediocre people who are negative, who spend their time proving that they were not wrong,” he wrote in The Testament of a Furniture Dealer in 1976. The way Ingvar saw it, the fear of making mistakes was “the enemy of development” and “the root of bureaucracy”.

The heaviest disaster

IKEA has made many mistakes over the years and has learnt a lot, but the heaviest one of all involved pianos.

The man who always says yes!

Jan Ahlsén worked as a developer of products and materials at IKEA for 40 years. Here he talks about his successes but mostly about his most exciting mistakes.

The Testament of a Furniture Dealer

Long before the rest of the world started talking about corporate culture, Ingvar Kamprad wrote down his vision and ideology for IKEA. He called it The Testament of a Furniture Dealer. It describes how IKEA needs to act to remain a successful, vibrant company. So what exactly is it all about?

Too big in Japan

In the early 1970s, IKEA decided to take on the Japanese market. Expansion outside of Sweden was going well in Northern Europe, and for many Japan felt like the natural, logical next step. They could see similarities between the Scandinavian design tradition, and Japan’s simplicity and wooden furniture.

When the eyes came off

When Catti Bengtsson’s phone rang one afternoon in May 1997, she had no reason to be concerned. For just over three years, she and her colleagues had worked hard and extremely carefully to create Children’s IKEA, a brand new department with everything from soft rocking-bananas to toys and bed sheets. But that phone call changed everything.