Ikea: an empire built on self-assembly
The Swedish homestore giant Ikea has conquered the world with its stylish flatpack furniture, cunning store layouts - and the promise of meatballs for the weary shopper.
More than 20 years have passed since Ikea opened its first British store, and it s a reasonable bet that some of the original customers are still trying to put their bookcases together. Classlessness is usually cited as the secret of the Swedish furniture giant s success, but what really makes its customers equal is the shared experience of mopping your brow while looking blankly at what they give you instead of instructions.
Never short of a cost-saving wheeze, Ikea pulls you into its alluringly-lit, meatball-scented mega-outlets, and sends you home with a cardboard box full of flat-packed cuts of wood, a sachet of screws and a sheet of paper featuring drawings of a little man with a hammer and a plot line that ends in tears.
Many doubted for obvious reasons that the blue-and-yellow behemoth would ever hit the big time in cack-handed Britain. But last week it was revealed that almost 10 per cent of everything we spend on furniture now goes to Ikea, and that a third of us buy something from the chain every year. Across Europe, its success is even greater. It has cornered the market in low-price furniture to such an extent that it is now estimated that one in 10 babies is conceived in an Ikea bed.
Today, the Ikea-verse encompasses the United States, Asia and, as of this year, South America. And, as each day carries it closer to global domination, the question of what lies at the heart of the company s unstoppable rise becomes more pressing.
Last year, 600 million customers visited Ikea s stores, spending 20 billion, eating their way through two billion of those meatballs, and carrying off 168 million catalogues. Nothing deters them: not the long crawls around greasy retail-park feeder roads, nor the pitched battles for parking spaces, the mob scenes in the aisles, the habitually overwhelmed and bewildered staff, or ordering systems conceived by alien intelligences.
Ikea can happily ride out such brickbats because its customers know that there s simply nowhere else on Earth that you can buy such stylish modern furniture at such low prices, while leaving the kids in a supervised play park on the promise of hot dogs and lingonberry mousse if they re good.
Some studies portray Ikea as a cult, others as a kind of social networking forum where harassed modern homemakers go for solidarity. But the core truth is that, no matter what you intend to buy when you go to Ikea, you will always come out having bought more. And, as your home fills up with those coolly named Scandinavian-style ranges, you will need even more of them to maintain your now-unmistakable look .
Soon you become an expert in the language of Ikea, debating the qualities of the Poang furniture against the Ektorp, the Grundtal kitchen range against the Arstid lamps, until you can reflect, as you pull a CD from your pine-look Benno rack and whack back a deserved slug of vino from a Hederleg wine glass the size of a goldfish bowl, on just how modern and sophisticated you have become.
And then your wardrobe falls over. Tales of Ikea rage have arisen from all corners of the globe, and, even if Russell Crowe denies taking a sledgehammer to his son s half-built cot (the actor later claimed he had merely called a carpenter), there are thousands for whom the chain s glue-it-and-screw-it dictates are a torment too far.
They are, however, only the last of many. What you find on entering Ikea is, perhaps, the most fiendishly clever, ruthlessly targeted concept in the whole history of selling. The stores don t have a bed department over here, and a kitchen shop over there. That sort of simplicity would be far too easy for the customers to suss out, and use to their advantage.
Instead, Ikea takes you on a journey along a winding blue path past lots of things that you didn t know you needed until you saw them towels, saucepans, measuring spoons all enticingly displayed in baskets and racks, at prices so low it seems insane not to buy them. And if, in the process, you miss what you are actually looking for, you have to follow the path again, collecting even more stuff.
And so it goes on, until you stagger out with a trolley stacked high, and you understand why Ikea is the biggest retailer of its kind in the world.
Everybody I know hates it, says Alan Penn, an urban planning specialist at University College London. But everybody goes. It s a form of sado-masochism. They make it a complete nightmare. You double back on yourself, can t see the shortcuts, you don t see the outside world. It s psychologically disruptive a kind of brainwashing, really.
Who could have dreamed up such a place? Ikea s story begins in the southern Swedish village of Agunnaryd. Here, in June 1926, was born Ingvar Kamprad, a farmer s son, who grew up with a knack for selling things. By the time he was 17, Ingvar was running his own mail-order business from a garden shed, supplying matches, candles, cigarette lighters and, occasionally, small pieces of furniture.
One day, when he was struggling to load a table into a customer s car, he was struck by a thought that would change not only his life, but the whole shape of 20th-century living: wouldn t it be easier, he reasoned, if I took the legs off?
Today, Ingvar lives in semi-retirement in Switzerland. By some estimates, he is the world s richest man, although assessing his true worth is made difficult by the complex web of tax-avoiding trusts and charitable holdings that make up the company s legal ownership. Not that the boss flaunts his wealth. Or his past. Biographers have claimed that he was once a member of Sweden s equivalent of the Hitler Youth, that he has fought a life-long battle with the bottle, and that he is so mean that when he goes to coffee shops he wipes the plastic spoons clean and takes them home.
All that Ingvar is happy to share with the world are his rules of success, the first being: nothing is impossible. Not even lining up those damned screws.
