Explore

Topics

18 months in smoke and dust

Following some intensive years of expansion in the 1970s, IKEA suffered serious growing pains. Many new stores had opened in Europe, and the workforce was increasing dramatically. Meanwhile, the organisation itself had barely developed since the 1960s. Communication was slow, and costs rose while quality fell. The oil crisis was just the last straw. A serious concerted effort was now needed, before it was too late.

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.

In the mid-1990s, IKEA was rocked by accusations of child labour. At the time the company was the world’s largest furniture retailer, with almost 100 stores in 17 countries, and production in 70. As success for IKEA increased, so too did the media’s scrutiny. Revelations of child labour would lead to a new compass – cooperation with UNICEF and Save the Children, and codes of conduct on everything from child labour to environmental impact.

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.

Everything falls apart

Before 1989, production behind the Iron Curtain was a cornerstone of the long-term purchasing strategy at IKEA. Ingvar Kamprad came here back in the 1960s when he was boycotted by furniture makers and the sector as a whole in Sweden. Planned economies like Poland had raw materials at low prices, as well as state-owned factories with great capacity and a need to do business with the West, as eastern currencies could not be used in the West or exchanged for dollars. IKEA made major investments in run-down factories, installed machinery and spare parts, and built up skills. So what happened when the Iron Curtain suddenly fell?

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”.

How did a self-described failure from Småland become one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs? In excerpts from our new Ingvar Kamprad exhibition, close co-workers share stories about his drive, curiosity, creativity, and the ability to see problems as opportunities. In the exhibition Hej Ingvar! at IKEA Museum, you can view and listen to many more stories.

IKEA in Stockholm

When IKEA opened its first store in Stockholm in summer 1965, it was Europe’s largest furniture store. It was big and it looked good, but it wasn’t exactly efficient. In fact you might say that it wasn’t until the store burned down five years later that IKEA really got the hang of the store concept. Along the way there were colourful little plastic balls, revolutionary posters, and a famous museum in New York. But it all began with a king in a muddy ditch.

Ingvar Kamprad’s experiment in selling furniture went well. So well, indeed, that the traditional furniture industry felt threatened by the rebel from the province of Småland. A price war started, boycotts were introduced, and competitors used every trick in the book to stop IKEA.

Something for everyone

At IKEA, there should be something to suit all tastes. But how do you create a varied range of products? Part of the answer can be found in a floral pattern from the 1990s.

The heaviest disaster

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

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.