Here at G Williams we love IKEA! Below we have written an article on interesting facts you may or may not know about the Swedish company:
1. The name IKEA is an acronym comprising the initials of the founder’s name, Ingvar Kamprad, the farm where he grew up, Elmtaryd and his home village, which happens to be called Agunnaryd
2. Initially, IKEA only sold small goods like pens and wallets. IKEA began selling furniture in 1948. It then took a future 8 years before they introduced their flat-packed furniture.
3. The first item of IKEA flat-pack furniture was the Lovet, a leaf-shaped side table, which first appeared in the 1956 catalogue.
4. Flat-pack furniture was invented in Sweden by Gillis Lundgren (also the designer of the Billy bookcase),when he decided to remove the legs off a table because he could not get the table into his car. Gillis was hired by Ingvar Kamprad.
5. The use of the “assembly figures” in IKEA manuals instead of printing actual words is because it would make the manuals thicker and consequently more expensive to produce.
6. Each product is named after actual Swedish words. Kamprad was dyslexic, so he named his products using proper names and words, because it made them easier for him to identify. IKEA’s curtains are given mathematical geometrical terms and bathroom products are named after lakes, rivers and bays.
7. More than 11.6 billion Swedish meatballs are sold in the UK alone.
8. The IKEA catalogue is more printed than the Bible. The IKEA catalogue started in 1951, goes out to over 180 million people in 29 different languages annually, compared to around 100 million bibles.
9. IKEA has moved from making home furniture to making actual homes themselves. The BoKlok home is not quite flat-packed, but it is largely prefabricated. As a result of a partnership between IKEA and Swedish construction company Skanska, there are now BoKlok homes in Sweden, Norway, Finland and the UK.
10. The Billy bookshelf, in its various incarnations, remains the retailer's most sought-after product. It first hit stores in 1979 and has now sold to over 60 million units.
11. With IKEA being one of the world's largest producers of wood products (roughly 1% of the worlds wood), in order to promote sustainable forestry IKEA has
invested in forests. In Romania IKEA owns 46,700 hectares of FSC-certified forest making it the largest private forest owner in the country.
We hope you enjoyed reading this article on IKEA, if you ever need an item collected or help assembling furniture G Williams would be happy to help. Please feel free to contact us for a free no-obligation quotation.
