On a recent Sunday, I woke up around 8 A.M. I had slept on a SULTANA HAGAVIK mattress. I smoothed the DVALA fitted sheet and tucked the HENNY CIRKEL quilt beneath four pillows sheathed in matching polka-dot cases. In the kitchen, some lettuce clung to the meniscus of a BLANDA BLANK salad bowl. Rouged RÄTTVIK wineglasses and dirty DRAGON forks waited to be washed. In the living room, I sat down on the KIVIK sofa. Because it is a few years old, its lines are leaner than those of current models, which have been expanded to accommodate the modern habit of perching a laptop on the armrest.
KIVIK—along with a profusion of things I use every day—is made by IKEA, the Swedish home-furnishings company. IKEA has three hundred and twenty-six stores in thirty-eight countries. In the fiscal year 2010, it sold $23.1 billion worth of goods, a 7.7-per-cent increase over the year before. IKEA calls itself the Life Improvement Store. The invisible designer of domestic life, it not only reflects but also molds, in its ubiquity, our routines and our attitudes. When IKEA stopped selling incandescent light bulbs, last year, six hundred and twenty-six million people became environmentalists.
The prevalence of IKEA in my apartment is more the result of circumstance than of desire or discernment. Since graduating from college, nine years ago, I have moved eight times, propelled by the usual vicissitudes of money, romance, and work. My first encounter with IKEA was in the freshman-year dormitory, where I marvelled at the profligacy of classmates who, that September, and each one thereafter, ordered a new couch from IKEA—and paid the ninety-nine-dollar delivery fee! (My roommates and I settled for a hand-me-down, which we covered with a sleeping bag and doused in Febreze.) By the time I was a senior, I had my own room and had acquired my first piece of IKEA furniture, an only slightly shopworn navy-blue love seat. A shared apartment in Manhattan followed. It suffered from a plight that IKEA has acknowledged in an internal report titled “Life in Rental Accommodation”: the tragedy of the common room is that it often is a dump. There were several apartments in the West Village, and one, farther south, in which my parents and I spent a long night trying to assemble an IKEA bookshelf with the guidance of only a stick man with a mute smirk. IKEA omits words from instruction booklets, because words make instruction booklets thicker, which makes them more expensive. The screws strip easily. Amy Poehler once said that IKEA is Swedish for “argument.” In Tribeca, I pridefully refused IKEA, like a child announcing that she no longer plays with dolls. IKEA can also be Swedish for feeling like you’re never going to grow up.
The apartment I live in now is a rental in west London. Like many rentals here, it comes furnished—which means that, instead of your having to go to IKEA and get the stuff yourself, the landlord goes to IKEA and gets it for you. IKEA offers more than nine thousand products, divided into four “style groups”: Traditional, Scandinavian, Modern, and Popular. (These are subdivided into such categories as Continental Dark, Continental Light, Contemporary, and Ethnic.) I moved into the London apartment in January. The person I live with had added to the mostly Modern infrastructure a few personal touches, for an effect one might call Itinerant Indifferent: a picture frame with no picture, various gifts from his mother, no knife that could penetrate meat. I put the picture frame in a drawer. The knives I cared enough about to buy a decent set from a department store. In a paper called “On the IKEAnization of France,” a sociologist named Tod Hartman suggests that IKEA resolves the conundrum posed by Georges Perec in his 1965 novel, “Les Choses,” about a young couple consumed with unhappiness at the discrepancy between the dismal home they have and the tasteful one they think they deserve. “Question your teaspoons,” Perec later wrote.
Eventually, we drove to the IKEA store in Wembley, where we picked out some throw pillows and a phalaenopsis orchid. We liked the SNÄRTIG bud vase, the surface of which is dotted with tiny bubbles, like eyelet lace. It cost fifty-nine pence, which makes it what IKEA calls a “breathtaking item”—so affordable that you can’t afford not to buy it. We took two. IKEA offers the serendipity of the yard sale without the mothballs.
Bill Moggridge, the director of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, in New York, calls IKEA’s aesthetic “global functional minimalism.” He said, “It’s modernist, and it’s very neutral in order to avoid local preferences, to get the economies of scale they need in order to keep the prices good.” IKEA products are intended to work as well in Riyadh as they do in Reykjavík. (Pigs and skeletons, for example, are banned motifs.) Last year, IKEA’s business in China, where it has eight stores, grew by twenty per cent. IKEA sells a few products (water fountains, chopsticks, mosquito nets) tailored to a Chinese clientele, but ninety-five per cent of the product range is standard. It is said that one in ten Europeans is conceived in an IKEA bed.
People have cared intensely about the decoration of their houses since cavemen began painting on walls. We are attached to our belongings because they are vessels for our memories and for our aspirations. Freud wrote to Martha, his future wife, during their engagement:
Our curio cabinets and chesterfield sofas are the backdrops of domesticity, forming the unchanging indoor landscape—mahogany mountains, meadows of chintz—against which we go about life. Choosing a piece of furniture was once a serious decision, because of the expectation that it was permanent. It is said that Americans keep sofas longer than they keep cars, and change dining-room tables about as often as they trade spouses. IKEA has made interiors ephemeral. Its furniture is placeholder furniture, the prelude to an always imminent upgrade. It works until it breaks, or until its owners break up. It carries no traces. (Jonathan Coulton’s song “IKEA”: “Just some oak and some pine and a handful of Norsemen / Selling furniture for college kids and divorced men.”) In David Fincher’s 1999 movie, “Fight Club,” the character played by Edward Norton flips through an IKEA catalogue while sitting on the toilet. “Like so many others, I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct,” he says, in a voice-over. “If I saw something clever, like a little coffee table in the shape of a yin-yang, I had to have it.” The ease of self-invention that IKEA enables is liberating, but it can be sad to be able to make a life, or to dispose of it, so cheaply.
IKEA stores, like Chihuahuas and cilantro, provoke extreme reactions. Some people, such as the members of the “Official IKEA Is Hell on Earth” Facebook group, can’t stand them. Others treat IKEA as a human-size doll house, hanging around its prettily furnished rooms just for entertainment. In recent months, middle-aged singles have taken to congregating in a Shanghai IKEA in such numbers that management has been forced to cordon off a designated “match-making corner.” Shen Jinhua, an IKEA employee, told the Shanghai Daily, “Before we set up an isolated area for them, they occupied the seats in the dining area for a long time, and thus other guests could not find a seat.”
Each IKEA store is carefully laid out to stimulate certain behaviors. Johan Stenebo, who worked at IKEA for twenty years, writes in “The Truth About IKEA” (2009), “One could describe it as if IKEA grabs you by the hand and consciously guides you through the store in order to make you buy as much as possible.” In June, I visited IKEA’s new store in Hyllie, a suburb of the Swedish city of Malmö. The store, which opened in September, 2010, is IKEA’s “everyday best practice” store. Martin Albrecht, the store’s manager, agreed to give me a tour of the premises. “All the knowledge and wisdom of our stores is built into this one,” he said.
A bin of blue-and-yellow tarpaulin bags stood at the store’s entrance. Albrecht explained that a customer, wherever he is, should always be able to see the next bin of bags. We were standing on the gray path that guides customers through an IKEA store. “We call this the Main Aisle,” Albrecht said. “You should feel safe that you can walk it and you won’t miss anything.” The Main Aisle is supposed to curve every fifty feet or so, to keep the customer interested. A path that is straight for any longer than that is called an Autobahn—a big, boring mistake. Those customers who would like to veer off the IKEA-approved route often cannot find the exit. IKEA stores have secret doors, like those in “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”: one can step through them and go directly from Living Rooms (which an IKEA store always starts with) to Children’s Rooms (“Cots are our ticket to building a lifelong relationship with our core customers,” according to an internal report) without having to look at two hundred bath mats on the way. But the hidden portals are almost impossible to find: if sticky eyeballs are the metric of success on the Internet, then IKEA rules sticky feet. Alan Penn, a professor of architectural and urban computing at University College London, conducted a study of the IKEA labyrinth and deemed it sadomasochistic. The only comparably vast shopping environment he could think of, he told the London Times, was the Bazaar of Isfahan, a seventeenth-century Persian marketplace.
Albrecht, an affably earnest man in a blue-and-yellow polo shirt, led the way past several room sets. In the IKEA catalogue, the rooms are always perfectly done, but in stores the quality of their execution varies. Design experts love IKEA’s products but consider going to retrieve them a necessary evil. Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, a co-founder of the blog Apartment Therapy, praised IKEA for “the inventiveness of their designs” and “the usability of their furniture,” but, he added, “A brand-new IKEA store that’s fully stocked can be a happy place, but one that’s been trampled by the crowds on a Saturday is an ugly place to be.”
At the Malmö store, Albrecht and I ran into Gabrielle Granath and Linda Eriksson, who were tidying a room set.
“We find things all over the place,” Granath said. “We find trash in the trash bins.”
“Sometimes in the toilets,” Eriksson added.
Granath and Eriksson explained that their job was to keep the room sets looking fresh. They change the slipcovers once a week. They cut wicks on candles and dust fake computer screens. They make sure that all the price tags aim to the left.
Albrecht indicated a box of green fleece blankets, meant to complement a couch on display. “This we would call an ‘add-on,’ ” he explained. Add-ons are not the only way that IKEA encourages what it refers to, internally, as “unplanned purchasing.” When we reached the Market Hall section of the store, where IKEA sells pots, pans, and other lightweight items, Albrecht declared, “Now it’s the famous Open the Wallet section.” There, an abundance of cheap goods—flowerpots, slippers, lint rollers—encourages the customer to make a purchase, any purchase, the thinking being that IKEA shoppers buy either nothing or a lot. There is art in the visual merchandising, too. Albrecht showed me how IKEA uses a technique called “bulla bulla,” in which a bunch of items are purposely jumbled in bins, to create the impression of volume and, therefore, inexpensiveness.
IKEA constitutes a sort of borderless nation-state, with seats of power, redoubts of conservatism, second cities, imperial outposts, creative hubs, and administrative backwaters. In a letter that prefaces “A Furniture Dealer’s Testament,” the company’s constitutional text, Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA’s founder, wrote, “A well-known industrialist/politician once said that IKEA has had a greater impact on the democratization process than many political measures combined.”
The capital of IKEA is Älmhult, a small village on Sweden’s southern peninsula. Kamprad, who is eighty-five, opened the first IKEA store there, in 1953. Älmhult lies halfway between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, in Småland, a remote region of barren, rocky flatland. Smålanders are known, more or less, as the Scots of Sweden. Faced with the area’s harsh winters and lack of arable soil, many of them immigrated to Minnesota in the nineteenth century. Those who didn’t are renowned for their obstinacy and thrift. The Småland ethos is central to IKEA’s self-mythology. “Like Småland’s farmers, our values are down-to-earth,” an IKEA ad from 1981 read. “We have toiled hard in a difficult field to produce sweet harvests.” Clogs and a lip full of snus are still the favored uniform of Kamprad loyalists.
Kamprad’s paternal grandparents, Achim and Franziska, arrived in Småland in the winter of 1896. Immigrants from Germany, they had bought a timber estate of four hundred and forty-nine hectares near Agunnaryd, about twelve miles from Älmhult, after seeing an advertisement in the back of a hunting magazine. They established a farm there. They didn’t speak Swedish. The farm, called Elmtaryd, foundered. In the spring of 1897, after the local savings bank rejected his loan application, Achim Kamprad shot his hounds and then killed himself. His widow continued to run the farm, which in 1918 passed to her eldest son, Feodor. He married the daughter of the proprietor of the area’s biggest country store, “the old kind with four or five assistants, the smell of herring and toffees and leather,” as Ingvar Kamprad described it to Bertil Torekull in his authorized biography, “Leading by Design,” published in 1998. Ingvar was born in 1926. At Elmtaryd, Torekull writes, “the silence is still more likely to be broken by the bark of a roebuck than the sound of a tractor or a car.” I.-B. Bayley, a Kamprad cousin, recalled young Ingvar’s life there:
For Christmas in 2007, IKEA employees received a DVD about the first sixty years of Kamprad’s life. The cover featured an image of a stone wall built in the Småland style, along with a head shot of Kamprad, like a Mao or a Padre Pio. Kamprad has said that he engineered his first business deal at the age of five, when he contracted with an aunt in Stockholm to buy a hundred boxes of matches. “Then I sold the boxes at two or three öre each, sometimes even five öre,” Kamprad told Torekull. “Talk about profit margins, but I still remember the lovely feeling.” Eventually, Kamprad branched out into Christmas cards and wall hangings. He caught fish and picked lingonberries. At eleven, he made a killing in garden seeds. As Kamprad tells it, he was an Agunnarydian Iacocca: “In my last year at middle school, my first rather childish business was beginning to look rather like a real firm.”
Kamprad founded IKEA at his uncle Ernst’s kitchen table, in 1943. (The “I” is for “Ingvar,” the “K” is for “Kamprad,” the “E” is for “Elmtaryd,” and the “A” is for “Agunnaryd.”) He sold fountain pens, encyclopedias, table runners, udder balm, reinforced socks. In 1948, in imitation of a competitor, he added furniture to his portfolio. The business was mostly mail-order: at six-fifty every morning, the milk bus came by the farm’s churn stand and picked up goods that had been ordered, carrying them on to the train station. In 1949, Kamprad published a circular in the national farmers’ newspaper. His appeal, “To the People of the Countryside,” read:
But the mail-order business proved tricky: customers were not always pleased with the items that arrived on their doorsteps. In 1952, Kamprad bought a joinery in Älmhult—his grandfather’s general store had once occupied the site—and set up a showroom, where people could come and see the goods. “At that moment, the basis of the modern IKEA concept was created, and in principle it still applies: first and foremost, use a catalogue to tempt people to come to an exhibition, which today is our store,” Kamprad later said. In 1963, IKEA opened its first store outside Sweden, in Oslo. Ten years later, IKEA was expanding so frantically that German executives accidentally opened a store in Konstanz when they had meant to open one in Koblenz.
In June, I flew to Copenhagen. From there, I look a train to Älmhult. Out the window, I glimpsed a series of glittering lakes that appeared to be populated by the hardy mothers and cherubic children of La Leche League literature. Abandoned crofts bordered wooden cottages painted Sweden’s traditional Falu red. Two and a half hours later, I reached Älmhult’s station. The town was quiet, as though a storm had just blown through. I walked across the tracks and, in five minutes, arrived at what is known as the “IKEA village”: a large parking lot surrounded by IKEA corporate offices, an IKEA store, a museum, and an IKEA hotel. Twenty-five hundred of Älmhult’s eighty-five hundred inhabitants work for IKEA. Spending time in Älmhult is a prerequisite for advancing one’s career at IKEA, and the social scene is as intense as the professional one. “It’s a very strange climate,” Johan Stenebo, the former employee, told me. “Älmhult is pretty much what you get if you live in the middle of a dark, boring forest.” It sounded like a mixture of Lowell, Massachusetts, summer camp, and “Ice Storm”-era New Canaan. According to an IKEA brochure, “At first sight, Älmhult seems very normal. But in time a sense of positive madness begins to surface.”
My first appointment in Älmhult was at IKEA’s “corporate culture centre,” Tillsammans. (It means “together” in Swedish.) Michele Acuna, who had recently moved to Älmhult from Shanghai, was my guide. A native Californian in her forties, she spoke fluent IKEAn. IKEA’s products offered “solutions” to “challenges.” Its employees were “co-workers.” Kamprad was “Ingvar” or “the founder.” Rooms were “living situations,” which, a circle graph explained, are occupied by eight categories of people: “baby,” “toddler,” “starting school,” “tweens and teens,” “living single/starting out,” “living single/established,” “living together/starting out,” and “living together/established.” (The uncertainty I felt at deciding which label I qualified for reminded me why a trip to IKEA can induce existential dread.)
Inside the museum, I played a magnetic matching game, pairing products with their designers. Traditionally, the names of IKEA’s bookcases derive from different occupations; curtains are given names from mathematics; and bathroom products are named for lakes and rivers. A file cabinet was filled with cards bearing unfortunate IKEA product names: ANIS, DICK, FANNY, BRACKEN (a homophone for “vomiting” in Dutch), GUTVIK (a child’s bed; it sounds like “good fuck” in German). At a poker table, I perused cards inscribed with bits of Kampradiana: the time someone tried to sell the founder an intercom system, and the founder yelled to a co-worker, “We already have one!”; the time the founder was in Romania, looking at a freezer case full of ducks, and wondered, What do they do with all the feathers? (He wanted to use them for pillows.) The feather story is to Kamprad as the cherry-tree tale is to George Washington. In another version I heard, it was China and chickens.
Near a display of LACK tables, we ran into an executive—a European with reading glasses and a sweater draped over his shoulders. “It is one of the most copied,” he said, of LACK. “So many have tried to do the same. But they make it a little more ugly.” He, Acuna, and the P.R. person who had accompanied us dissolved into a round of giggles.
On the way out the door, I noticed a video of Kamprad, in a chambray shirt and gold chain, playing on a nearby screen. It also showed men and women prying stones out of the Smålandian soil with what looked like a large spoon.
“As long as earth has houses for people, there will also be a need for a strong and efficient IKEA,” a narrator intoned.
Acuna looked me in the eyes. “You know that’s the vision of the company—to create a better life for the many?”
That night, I stayed at the IKEA hotel. Its Web site promises, “Guests sleep well and wake up refreshed, without art or frills.” The lounge area was fresh and bright, like a scene from the IKEA catalogue. I sat on a candy-striped KARLSTAD chair and listened to supply managers discuss the respective turnaround times of China and Pakistan in global English. Swedish-speaking men with mustaches wore short-sleeved plaid shirts and drank Eriksberg beer. Ostensibly, this was a public space, but I felt as if I had walked into a bar where everybody had been at the same wedding. Behind the reception desk was a series of candy jars filled with gummy bears and caramels. Why was the receptionist smiling so broadly? Were the toasting salesmen bit players in some sort of Älmhultian “Truman Show”?
IKEA is obsessed with lista, which translates as “making do.” IKEA employees, including the C.E.O., travel in coach. To save money, the company uses employees as models for its catalogues. “I’m tall, so the furniture looks too small when I’m standing by it,” one told me. “So I usually have to be sitting or lying down on a couch.” In “A Furniture Dealer’s Testament,” Kamprad writes, “It is not only for cost reasons that we avoid the luxury hotels. We don’t need flashy cars, impressive titles, uniforms or other status symbols. We rely on our strength and our will!” (Don’t order that ficus!) Kamprad drives a beat-up Volvo. He is reported to recycle tea bags. He is known to pocket the salt and pepper packets at restaurants. He has ranked as high as fifth on Forbes’s list of the world’s richest people.
IKEA’s utopian strain derives partly from Swedish tradition. In the nineteenth century, Carl Larsson’s influential watercolors depicted halcyon scenes of family life—blond children, blond furniture, teapots, kittens, striped cotton rugs. In the nineteen-thirties, the social-democratic movement advanced the idea of the folkhemmet—“the people’s home”—using the home as a metaphor for its vision of a harmonious, classless Sweden. After the war, the folkhemmet became manifest in the Scandinavian design movement, which envisaged a world in which beautiful things would be made accessible to everyone through mass production. The Swedish welfare state built more than a million new dwellings, and issued advice on interior design, health, and hygiene.
“What IKEA did then was to commercialize this idea,” Cilla Robach, a curator at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Stockholm, told me. “Ingvar Kamprad understood quite early how to change the social-democratic ideology into money and make an industry of it.” IKEA is Legos for grownups, connecting the furniture of our adulthoods with the toys of our childhoods.
IKEA is proud of its egalitarianism. Perks such as special parking places and corporate dining rooms are not considered “IKEA-mässigt”—acceptable in the IKEA world view—and co-workers who are thought to be snobbish are quickly disabused of their pretensions, or their positions: “If you don’t fit, you quit.” A recent edition of ReadMe, IKEA’s internal magazine, featured an article entitled “Step Inside—into two co-workers’ bathrooms,” in which a human-resources employee from Lisbon discussed her bidet. The sense of informality extends to customers. A recent promotion instructed Britons, “Chuck Out Your Chintz.” IKEA featured gay couples in its advertising as early as 1994. This year, it ran an ad, to accompany a store opening in Sicily, that featured two men holding hands, beneath the legend “We are open to all families.”
There is a conviction within IKEA that the company is more than a mere purveyor of futons and meatballs. Last year, in October, IKEA issued its first annual report. It justified the company’s scary-genius approach to cost-cutting, declaring, “Sustained profitability gives us resources to grow further and offer a better everyday life for more of the many people.” Mikael Ohlsson, the C.E.O., promised a new era of transparency. He said that he had decided to publish the report in response to interest from co-workers. However, the Financial Times noted, “Mr. Ohlsson’s drive for openness is long overdue, and intended to restore a corporate reputation sullied by a highly critical book by former senior IKEA executive Johan Stenebo.”
Ohlsson, a smiling blond man in rumpled khakis, told me that the purpose of the report was to diffuse some of the mystery surrounding IKEA, the ownership of which Kamprad transferred to a private foundation in 1982. “If you don’t tell, people start to wonder,” he said.
Ohlsson seemed almost wounded by the suggestion that IKEA was a multibillion-dollar business, rather than an altruistic concern. “IKEA was and will remain value-driven,” he said. “You see, this is to create a better life for the many people.” IKEA attempts to resolve the paradox of its devotion to cost-cutting and its altruistic self-image with team spirit. The near-messianic faith that IKEA employees have in the rightness of their cause can lead to an odd insularity. “One cannot help feeling sorry for those who cannot or will not join us,” Kamprad wrote in 1976, in “A Furniture Dealer’s Testament.” IKEA’s internal communications feature morality tales, with Kamprad as exemplar:
The ReadMe newsletter also contained the story of Nicole Wiesmüller, who had moved with the company from Vienna to Salzburg to Vienna to Linz and back to Salzburg. “Store manager Nicole Wiesmüller has moved around a lot,” the article read. “Cost: Her private life. Reward: Success with Her Co-workers.”
“IKEA at its worst is like a sect,” Goran Carstedt, a former head of IKEA North America, once said. According to Stenebo, employees parse Kamprad’s frequent handwritten faxes as if they were pages from the Talmud: “If he starts with ‘Dear,’ it is neutral. If he starts with only your first name it is a sharp request. If the fax starts with ‘Dearest’ you are in his good books.” The atmosphere at IKEA reminded me of that of a political campaign, with true believers, whispering skeptics, inside jokes, and deflection of even the most innocuous questions. A former senior executive told me that, although he still admired the company, he had found it suffocating. He said, “For me, it was like North Korea.”
When I was at the IKEA hotel, the sun stayed up until midnight. In Tillsamans, I wandered into a sort of rec room (it is used for conferences), which was equipped with a karaoke machine. On the wall, someone had painted the lyrics to an IKEA version of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”: “As long as there’s human life on earth / A strong IKEA has its worth / We satisfy the many needs / A strong IKEA that succeeds / Our culture leads us on our way / That’s the IKEA way!” Eventually, I went to my room. It was furnished with a pair of spartan single beds. Two books sat on top of a pine desk: the IKEA catalogue and the New Testament.
The LACK table is one of those commodities, like salt or cod, through which one could tell the story of the world. LACK, along with the BILLY bookshelf, is IKEA’s most iconic product. You may not know that you’ve seen it, but you have: it’s the twenty-two-by-twenty-two-inch side table that looks a bit like one of those plastic things which come in a pizza box.
LACK, which was introduced in 1979, sells for seven dollars and ninety-nine cents. IKEA’s designers begin, rather than end, with a price. “Normally, you get a brief with a price and a style matrix,” Marcus Arvonen, one of IKEA’s twelve staff designers, explained. “It’s ‘O.K., can you make this plastic spatula? It cannot cost more than one euro and has to function as a spatula, and it has to be gray and plastic.’ ”
A LACK table begins as a tree, or part of one. (IKEA is the world’s third-largest consumer of wood, behind Home Depot and Lowe’s, and ahead of Walmart.) Wood is used for IKEA’s more expensive products. Its by-products go into the making of particleboard, which is cut into the twenty-two-by-twenty-two-inch squares that form a LACK tabletop. Meanwhile, the table’s interior is being fabricated: IKEA uses a construction technique called “board-on-frame,” in which solid-wood exteriors are stuffed with paper innards. Scott made paper dresses; IKEA makes cardboard furniture.
IKEA invented flat-packed furniture in 1951, when an employee named Gillis Lundgren, struggling to squeeze a table into the back of his Volvo, decided to remove the legs. The company’s goal is to design products that can be packed as tightly as possible, minimizing damage and maximizing profit as they are transported over the oceans. Its motto: “We hate air!”
LACK tables are made in China and Poland, and in Danville, Virginia, at a plant owned by Swedwood, IKEA’s manufacturing subsidiary. The plant opened in 2008. As the Los Angeles Times reported, locals were, at first, mostly thrilled to hear that IKEA had chosen to build the plant—its only one in the United States—in Danville, a former textile town where the average annual income is twenty-nine thousand dollars.
Although the company had a reputation as a conscientious employer—it has ranked in Fortune’s list of the “Top 100 Companies to Work For”—there was trouble in Danville from the start. Six former employees filed grievances with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging racial discrimination. Employees complained that they were required to work mandatory overtime, often with no notice. Mike Ward, the head of IKEA USA, acknowledged, when we spoke in July, that mandatory overtime had been a problem. He said, “At this moment, ninety-five per cent of the overtime is voluntary, and so they’ve made great improvements there.” IKEA commissioned an internal audit of the plant, and found no further cause for concern.
But this summer Danville’s workers threatened to unionize. I asked Ward whether he felt that it was fair that the minimum pay for IKEA workers in Danville is eight dollars an hour, and that they receive twelve days’ vacation (eight of them selected by Swedwood), while their counterparts in Sweden make at least nineteen dollars an hour and get five weeks off. “I think that when we really dig and look, the situation in Danville meets our standards, the things that are concerns are being worked on actively, and we’ll respect the decisions that our co-workers make,” he said.
On July 27th, the Danville workers decided, by a vote of 221–69, to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. (IKEA’s code of conduct stipulates that workers be allowed to join unions if they choose to do so.) Several days later, I spoke to Bill Street, who leads the woodworkers’ division of the I.A.M.A.W. He said that conditions in Danville were still unacceptable. “I truly believe that Danville management has a plantation mentality,” he said. “They think that they own these workers and it’s their right to use them any way they so choose.”
Tawanda Tarpley, a union member who has worked at Swedwood since 2008, was less combative, but her complaints were the same. Swedwood’s managers, Tarpley said, hired their white friends and family members, overlooking black workers, even when they were more qualified. “I think it’s more of a structural unfairness, because they’re not mean.” She continued, “The plant manager, he came to me on Wednesday and he told me, ‘Tawanda, we are willing to do whatever we can to work together and to make this a better working environment for everyone.’ He told me that, so I’m praying that that will be an outcome.”
Each year, IKEA conducts thousands of “home visits,” in which co-workers go and nose around people’s houses—a “come as you are” party in which the party comes to your living room. In July, I joined Kerrice Hayward, an interior designer at one of London’s IKEA stores, and Tom James, a sales co-worker, on such a mission. “Basically, we go out and find what frustrates our customers,” Hayward said.
We drove for half an hour before arriving in Chatham, a village in Kent. Hayward parked on a sharply sloped street. We made our way to a nineteen-thirties-era terraced house, built of brick and pebble dash. It had a large bay window, with stained-glass panels depicting red roses.
A woman wearing leggings and a striped tunic greeted us.
“Shoes off?” Hayward asked. “Yes, please,” the woman, who introduced herself as Sandra Denbow, said, ushering us into the house’s front room.
Denbow is a full-time mother. Her husband, Paul, works for a company that recycles high-voltage transformers. (They are members of IKEA’s loyalty program, and had agreed to host the home visit in exchange for a seventy-five-pound voucher.) They live with their twenty-four-year-old son and their four-year-old daughter, who was drawing at the coffee table with colored pencils.
The daughter’s bedroom was pink and immaculate; the son’s, in the attic, was fluorescent green and surprisingly tidy. Sandra and Paul’s bedroom had blue carpeting, a water bed, and a wallpaper border of a tropical scene, with palm trees and schools of angelfish. “We had a son who died ten years ago, and this was his bedroom, so we really didn’t want to redecorate,” Sandra said.
Downstairs, we examined a small multipurpose room. Hayward politely pointed out to the Denbows that they were using a task light to illuminate the entire room. She wondered if they had considered IKEA lighting products.
“See, IKEA’s like, it’s too far to just pop in for a light,” Paul said.
“Could you tell me more?”
“I hate IKEA,” Paul said. “You walk round and round, and you’re never gonna get out.”
Hayward nodded.
“But I do like the products.”
As Denbow answered Hayward’s questions, I wanted to yell, “Fix the feet!”—those unfinished pine blocks on which many an otherwise attractive IKEA sofa sits, the Reeboks to its Armani suit.
This fall, in response to feedback from customers, IKEA will introduce a new version of the BILLY bookcase, which Gawker has described as “the bookshelf that everyone in every city with an IKEA is required to have in their apartments, because we are all pitiful sheep.” The new version will have deeper shelves, the better to display bobbleheads and wedding pictures in a time when people’s reading material increasingly resides on hard drives.
In 2002, Spike Jonze directed an ad for IKEA, in which an apartment dweller unplugs an ugly lamp—it’s orange, with one of those bendy, strawlike necks—takes it outside, and deposits it on the curb. The lamp sits in the rain. A man approaches. “Many of you feel bad for this lamp,” he says, with a Swedish Chef-type accent. “That is because you’re crazy. It has no feelings! And the new one is much better.”
IKEA has a largely excellent environmental record. But there are two caveats. IKEA builds its stores where land is cheap and you have to drive to get to them, and the company more or less invented disposable furniture. Movers have been known to advise their clients that IKEA items are not worth the cost of transport. I compare my apartment, full of IKEA, with my parents’ home, bereft of it, with some discomfort. There is the fact that I have added dozens of possessions to the world’s landfills, while they have been careful stewards of theirs. IKEA things are fresh, but they have no stories. Think of the beauty of classroom desks.
In “Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture,” Ellen Ruppel Shell argues that IKEA’s low prices exact untold environmental, aesthetic, and social tolls. IKEA, she writes, has managed to perpetrate “one of the great marketing gambits of the twenty-first century: the discreet transfer of costs from seller to buyer.” (She means labor costs.)
Still, IKEA offers irresistible deals. In 2007, BJURSTA, an extendable oak-veneer dining table, cost two hundred and ninety-nine dollars. Mindful of the recession and of rising wood prices, IKEA hollowed out the legs (which reduced the weight, making transport cheaper) and consolidated the manufacture of parts (bigger orders cost less). Customers appreciated that the table was lighter and less expensive. The more tables they bought, the more IKEA lowered the price. By 2011, BJURSTA cost a hundred and ninety-nine dollars. A Harvard Business School professor has written of “the IKEA effect,” in which the requirement of a little bit of labor enhances affection for its results. The Allen wrench is the egg to IKEA’s instant cake mix.
In Älmhult, I asked Jeanette Skjelmose, IKEA’s sustainability manager, whether IKEA was at least partially culpable for having created a throwaway culture. She resorted to false humility. “I think the trend of using products for a short life span comes from consumers,” she said. “I wish we had that much influence. I hope that our products have enough quality that they can have second and third lives in other people’s homes.”
The advantage of the IKEA approach is that its products don’t lag behind the way that people actually use them. Visiting the store at Wembley one day, I came across an interesting item: a black half-moon of polypropylene, with a gray beanbag-ish underbelly. Inspection revealed that it was BRÄDA, a “laptop support.” The TV tray of our moment, BRÄDA was developed in 2004 by Hanna Ahlberg, then a student at Lund Technical University. For her thesis in industrial design, she decided to make a soft piece of furniture that would allow teen-agers to do their homework in their beds. It also prevents the laptop from burning the leg (a condition that is technically known as “toasted skin syndrome”). Upon Ahlberg’s graduation, IKEA hired her as a product developer.
IKEA’s employees are some of the world’s foremost anthropologists of home life. From them I learned that people want twice the storage in bathrooms, because men now have as many grooming products as women do. They want food containers, as the IKEA catalogue puts it, “For all those recipes that call for five olives, half a can of tomatoes, and an ounce of couscous.” The British peer Michael Jopling once dismissed Michael Heseltine, the Deputy Prime Minister at the time, saying, “The trouble with Michael is that he had to buy his own furniture.” But Michael Heseltine didn’t have to drill holes in the back of the family Chippendale armoire to plug in the television.
The IKEA catalogue is a primer for the sort of “good, clean living” of which IKEA approves. The company published a hundred and ninety-seven million catalogues last year, in twenty-nine languages and sixty-one editions. As reading material, the IKEA catalogue is only slightly less popular than Harry Potter books. It combines the voyeuristic pleasures of browsing albums on Facebook (peeping into other people’s houses) with the aspirational ones of Architectural Digest (we are all a $39.99 bookshelf away from being well-read Swedish architects). The IKEA catalogue is a self-help manual for a certain kind of life. The French singer Renaud observes, in “Les Bobos,” “Their bedtime reading is . . . next to the IKEA catalogue / They like Japanese restaurants and Korean cinema.” They used to like ferns, but now they like orchids.
In Älmhult, I visited the offices of IKEA Communications, where the catalogue is made. Selin Hult, an information manager, and Henrik Palmberg, who said he was a “competence matrix owner,” showed me around. We enjoyed fika, the Swedish coffee break, with summer cake and mugs of tea, and then set off on a tour. First, we walked through a vast warehouse lined with towering racks of IKEA products—a sort of furniture lending library, where an interior designer can check out whatever crib or dresser he needs. It looked as though an entire high-rise had disgorged its contents. All around us, I could see three-sided rooms, like sitcom sets. “At full capacity, we can do twenty-five at once,” Palmberg said.
In a far corner, a room set had been built and furnished to resemble a bed-and-breakfast in the Swedish countryside. Whenever an IKEA designer creates a room set, for the catalogue or in a store, he or she writes up a detailed treatment. The treatment for the bed-and-breakfast read, “Story: a weekend hobby that turned into a full-time business, this B. and B. is nestled in the countryside untroubled by tourists. It is popular among those taking a break from the city and looking for peace and quiet. Despite its rural setting, this B. and B. is tastefully decorated to appeal to its urban guests.” The room’s designer, Sara Bohlin, had appointed the time of day “Morning/Breakfast.” The price, “Medium.” She had even mocked up a brochure for the place, which she had named Alanda. She was still putting on final touches. “I’m in a bit of a panic,” she said.
The kitchen looked rustically inviting, with wide white floorboards and white walls. The focal point was a large STORNÄS dining table, in gray, with STEFAN chairs and a MÅNLJUS pendant lamp. There were board games and a stack of woollen blankets on shelves, for the guests. A spotlight simulated a beam of morning light hitting the table. (You will find three types of lighting schemes in the IKEA catalogue: Let the Sun In, Lamps Lit, and Middle of the Day.) A carpenter had installed a real wood-burning stove, which the designer had found, into a “brick” hearth made of plywood. On the table sat a ceramic milk pitcher. To complete the tableau, Bohlin had gone out to fetch fresh bread and marmalade.
Just as the goal of a real room is to look like a fake one, the goal of a fake room is to look like a real one. At the catalogue headquarters, Hult and Palmberg showed me into a large room filled with kitchen supplies. I marvelled at bins of plastic food: mushrooms, strawberries, apples, lemons, bell peppers, bunches of green grapes. “When we go close, we go fresh,” Palmberg said. “Otherwise, we go fake.” A loaf of sourdough in the IKEA catalogue will have a slice taken out. If the photograph shows something frying, there ought to be grease in the pan, but not all over the stove. Some splashes in the sink are nice.
“Pillows should be a bit squished,” Bohlin said. “If you have a teacup, maybe there should be some smoke showing.”
Palmberg added, “And water on the floor outside the bathroom!”
IKEA attempts to make the room sets generically pleasing, but in some cases cultural differences necessitate tweaks. “We say we need to be as global as possible and as local as necessary,” Palmberg said. You’ll see a friendly golden retriever curled up by the dining-room table in the British catalogue, but not in the Emirati one. Europeans like to sit on their furniture while Americans prefer to sit in it. “A Swedish bed should be soft and inviting and open, so that you almost want to crawl in,” Hult explained. (Despite the influx of duvets in the seventies, most Americans remain wedded to the top sheet.) In the kitchen-supplies room, I counted fifteen coffee machines. Hult said, “For example, in Sweden we brew our own coffee, but perhaps if it’s in Italy you want an espresso machine. It’s these things that can make a difference. Small things, but quite important.”
IKEA believes that it can make your sleep better and that it can enhance your family life. All you have to do is buy IKEA products, such as the FLÖRT pen and pencil organizer, which you can hang on your bed, “so you won’t forgot those brilliant business ideas you have just before falling asleep. Or the title of your next novel!” IKEA’s vision of life in its environs is a safe and haimish one. In its rooms, people don’t run late, they don’t bicker; they have children, but they don’t have sex. The pedagogical impulse can get a bit overweening. “We want to be the leader in life at home,” Albrecht told me, in Malmö. “Not just be the leader in home furnishings, but show you how to live!” A few minutes later, he was pointing out an item that, he said, had not sold very well, because IKEA had not sufficiently illuminated its use. “If you don’t show the customer the function, the customer won’t understand it,” he said. The item was a broom.
IKEA is not really a Swedish company. It is controlled by a company called INGKA Holding, which, in turn, is controlled by the Dutch stitchting—a tax-exempt, nonprofit foundation—to which Ingvar Kamprad transferred his ownership shares in 1982. On its Web site, IKEA bills the stitchting structure as a means of creating “an ownership structure and an organization that stand for independence and a long-term approach,” but the move minimized IKEA’s tax burden, and the financial oversight to which the company is subjected.
In 1982, Kamprad also set up a company called Inter IKEA Systems B.V., which owns the IKEA concept and trademark. Three per cent of the revenues of each IKEA store go to Inter IKEA, as a kind of royalty. Those revenues then feed into the accounts of a series of offshore holding companies. “Few tasks are more exasperating than trying to assemble flat-pack furniture from IKEA,” The Economist wrote in 2006. “But even that is simple compared with piecing together the accounts of the world’s largest home-furnishing retailer.” The Economist pointed out that IKEA’s charitable giving through the Dutch foundation had been paltry—“barely a rounding error in the foundation’s assets.” More recently, IKEA has increased its commitment to philanthropy. Last month, the IKEA foundation pledged to donate sixty-two million dollars, over three years, to help Somali refugees in Kenya.
Kamprad has been a tax exile since the nineteen-seventies. He lives in the Swiss village of Epalinges, near Lausanne. “Kamprad has only very little taxes to pay,” Yvan Tardy, the mayor of Epalinges, told the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad. “Unfortunately, he has never done anything for our village.” Kamprad’s nickname in town is the Miser.
A bigger blow to Kamprad’s reputation came in 1994, when the Swedish newspaper Expressen published evidence revealing that Kamprad had once been active in the Swedish Nazi movement. The stories, by Pelle Tagesson, showed that Kamprad, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, had been a disciple of Per Engdahl, the leader of the Neo-Swedish movement. In 1948, Kamprad paid to publish a book of Engdahl’s political writings. In 1950, he invited Engdahl to his wedding, writing that he was proud to be a part of the Neo-Swedish circle. After Expressen’s revelations, Kamprad faxed a handwritten letter to his employees, entitled “MY GREATEST FIASCO.” “Dear IKEA family,” it read. “You have been young yourself, and perhaps you find something in your youth now, so long afterward, that was ridiculous and stupid. In that case, you will understand me better. In hindsight, I know that early on I should have included this in my fiascos, but that is now spilled milk.” The employees responded with a letter, signed by hundreds. “Ingvar, we are here whenever you need us.” Bertil Torekull, Kamprad’s handpicked biographer, writes, “Then the father of the family broke down and wept like a child.”
After more revelations of Nazi associations, Kamprad wrote an apology, which appeared in Torekull’s book, in a section entitled “A Youth and His Errors.” He explained that, growing up at Elmtaryd, he had been especially close to his grandmother, Grossmutter Franziska, who was from the Sudetenland. (Torekull writes that Kamprad didn’t come clean about all of his Nazi affiliations, because he had forgotten about them.) Kamprad concludes the chapter by asking, “As I have lain awake at night pondering this dismal affair, I have asked myself: when is an old man forgiven for the sins of his youth? Is it a crime that I was brought up by a German grandmother and a German father?”
Still, Kamprad enjoys a hero’s status in Sweden. “Everything that is about Ingvar Kamprad is big news,” Fredrik Sjöshult, a reporter for Expressen, told me. “He’s lived, like our version of the American dream, the Swedish dream.” Last year, the Malmö City Theatre premièred “Ingvar! A Musical Furniture Saga.” In the production, the Kamprad character is crucified on a Maypole. He sings, “Do you think this can stop Ingvar?”
In 2009, Sweden’s largest television station, SVT, revealed that IKEA’s money—the three per cent collected from each store—does not actually go to a charitable foundation in Holland, as IKEA had led people to believe. Rather, as Magnus Svenungsson reported, Inter IKEA is owned by a foundation in Liechtenstein, called Interogo, a corporate rainy-day fund. Interogo, which has amassed twelve billion dollars, is controlled by the Kamprad family.
IKEA is in the midst of a succession crisis. With his second wife, Margaretha, Kamprad has three sons, Peter, Jonas, and Matthias. None has any public profile. None has distinguished himself particularly within the company. In earlier years, Kamprad spoke of a sort of battle royal in which the son who proved himself most capable would inherit control of the company. More recently, he and his associates have suggested that none of them possess sufficient mettle.
IKEA would tell me only, “Peter, Jonas, and Matthias Kamprad will continue to occupy important board positions and actively participate in the future governance of the IKEA sphere companies. How they will exactly divide up the roles among them is under discussion.”
Even Bertil Torekull, who has likened Kamprad, as a leader, to “some venerable African freedom fighter,” admitted that Kamprad’s reluctance to anoint a successor endangered the stability of IKEA. “What he’s doing is risky,” Torekull told me. “It’s definitely time that other people must be more decisive or play a larger role.” He concluded, “Anything can happen when the strong Ingvar Kamprad is gone.”
Kamprad’s legacy in the dining room has never been in question. The Sunday that I bummed around on my living-room couch, I went over to a friend’s house for lunch. She served lamb on an IKEA platter and poured wine into IKEA wineglasses like the ones that I had earlier neglected to wash. At the end of September, she’s moving in with her boyfriend. She wrote to me, “I’m really torn about the IKEA question. Inevitably, there will be a trip there, but I’m actually really keen to take a bit more time this time around, and not do the ‘quick fix house kit-out’ and try and get some more bits and pieces from antique auctions and so on. But, then, who has the time and the patience (and the money!) to do that?” ♦
