Okay. So i just
got back from Ikea and i have a question: how did they start making you make your own stuff?
"You're thinking about buying a piece of self-assembly furniture.."
"An allen wrench. One allen
wrench puts together all the furniture!" " mean that's why this is a joke, right?
Who comes up with this idea that you've got to have: (Voices merging together) an allen wrench;
and taking one board ;and you're putting it over here — it's a thing.
How did this happen? It turns out that the answer reveals a lot
about the weirdness of Ikea and its history— and it even changed how i think about the company.
Some people speculate the reason Ikea does this is because of the Ikea effect— the idea that
there is this psychological effect that comes from assembling furniture that makes you devoted to it.
Or that it just saves money and helps the environment. That's kind of the Ikea line
all that may help but the real reason is a part of Ikea's history.
You find the story of Ikea in Bertil Torekull's book. Listen, I did look up how to pronounce a
lot of these Swedish names, but it's going to be a rough ride. Let's, let's be honest.
So this is how they started making you assemble your own stuff.
It's 1952 Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad is with his right-hand man Gillis Lundgren.
This is him in the 2010 catalog. So they're putting together the
1953 catalog and they're working on a table. Gillis says, "God what a lot of space it takes up
let's take the legs off and put them under the tabletop."
Ingvar's like, let's do it, let's give it a try. The Max, this table right here, becomes the first
assembled tabletop and others soon followed. And that's how self-assembly was invented.
But this flat pack, it actually solved quite a few problems: a big one is that it reduces transport
damage. You see, insurance companies hated Ikea because their furniture was always
getting damaged during shipping. A flat pack significantly reduced the damage during transport.
It saves space just as Gillis Lundgren proposed that it would
and it reinforced a design philosophy of relative simplicity.
So Ikea became a hit, Gillis went on to design the iconic Billy book case,
which made its debut in this catalog. So that's the reason that Ikea has self-assembly. But
that to me is just the start of the story. Who is this Ikea founder? Who is the guy who says
yeah sure let's just all of a sudden start making customers assemble their own stuff?
In what world does that decision make sense? For better or worse, I'm just gonna gloss
over the alleged nazi affinity that his family had, because i don't want this to be the third
video in a row where i feature Donald Duck... (Donald Duck offends a nation with Nazi chants)
It's too late.
He came from Smaland in Sweden. Gotta be honest, before I read this book
I thought Smaland was a made-up name for the Ikea play place. You know, small land.
Nope it's a real location. This guy started Ikea in a different form when he was just 17 in 1943.
The name came from Ingvar plus Elmtaryd the family farm and Agunarryd, the farm's parish.
He said he started selling fountain pens and basically never stopped selling...something.
So when i think about Ingvar, i think about Swedish Gary Vaynerchuk.
"There are a million reasons why not, but there's one great reason why."
The guy who makes customers put together their own stuff— he wants to succeed at any cost.
But Ingvar's drive is still just part of the self-assembly story,
because you gotta know why was Ikea designing their own furniture in the first place.
After all, their competition was a lot of different department stores that didn't design
furniture. They sold it. Look at the old catalogs and you'll see that that's what Ikea did at first
too. But for some reason they shifted into design and that reason, well, it's the boycott.
Now I'm gonna go inside and you know I'm a little bit nervous but
not that nervous. I think with a little courage I can pull this off. Before we
get to the boycott, I want to get to uh some of the investigative work that I did at Ikea today.
Okay, I'm here I made it to ikea. I have my veggie balls.
They were good. So what happened to Ikea?
Here's the timeline. In 1948, Ingvar started selling furniture. He immediately started
naming it, because numbers were hard to remember. Ruth was one of the first names. He soon wrote a
letter pitching Ikea as a folk hero company for the countryside, and in 1950 he went to
a big trade fair and immediately got banned. Big furniture sellers hated that Ikea was posting
consumer-facing prices and trying to cut out the middlemen— that was going to kill their business.
And those furniture dealers forced suppliers not to sell to Ikea. It was a boycott.
By 1957, Sweden's national Price and Cartel commission even came out against poor little Ikea.
But wherever there was a loophole to this furniture supplier's boycott, Ikea would find it.
"Gotta have a dream, but you gotta be practical!" The National Association of Furniture Dealers
said Ikea was a monster with seven heads. "If you cut off one, another soon grows."
Some furniture suppliers were limited by their contracts.
They could only sell certain products to one store a new design allowed them to get around the
restrictions of the contract. That loophole led to them designing their own furniture, which led
to them designing the flat pack, which led to you in your house trying to assemble Ikea furniture.
Eventually, Ikea got supplies from other places like Poland. But the cultural change had happened.
People put together their own stuff all because the Swedish furniture industry tried to kill Ikea.
And when they tried to kill that seven-headed monster they only made it bigger.
So what does it all mean? Uh you know, cards on the table here, I like Ikea.
Ikea isn't ashamed of its history either. You can find
all this stuff in the Ikea digital museum. And they paint Ingvar as this like feisty rebel guy.
They probably would like the Gary Vee comparison. "Every second you spend thinking about what
somebody else has is taking away from time that you could create something for yourself."
But I get that some people think their weird rococo corporate structure seems to hint at
something a little fishy. And of course Ikea doesn't really gloat about the
side effects of their rapacious business. All that said, for me the story is that as
an American I always had a different impression of Ikea. I thought of them as this kind of fancy
designy company. I think part of that is because Ikea used to only be around big cities here in
America, and part of it is that they prominently feature design in their current ad campaigns.
But the history that comes from that Ikea book and the history that comes from papers
like this MIT Business review one convinced me that that impression was really superficial.
Ikea was scrappy and is now indomitable. And when i think about it in the future,
I'm probably gonna start thinking about companies like Walmart.
Ikea might tell you how to build furniture yourself,
but that's only because they refused to let anyone tell them how to sell it.
All right that's it for this one with all that the only thing I actually got
at Ikea today was a fake plant. But you know, I think it'll get there.
I'm working on this long process of trying to make this set look a little more put together. If you
haven't been here before, this is a personal channel where i talk about personal stuff,
history stuff. All sorts of things like that. I'd love it if you subscribe to see the next
video or if you commented to let me know what you think about Ikea or about any of
the things in this video. And otherwise, I will see you in the next one. Bye.