#100 1956 · IKEA · Furniture retailattack-invisible-cost
A table wouldn't fit in an IKEA employee's car, so he sawed its legs off — and built the company's entire business model out of the fix
the problem
Furniture is expensive to store, ship and sell because it's already assembled into its bulkiest possible shape
background
Furniture in the 1950s was sold the way it had always been sold: built and finished at the factory, then shipped whole. That meant paying to move mostly-empty air — a shipped table or chair is bulky far out of proportion to the wood and fabric in it — and it meant a shop floor's stock was limited to whatever finished pieces fit in the showroom and back room, since nothing could be compressed for storage.
IKEA in 1956 was a small Swedish mail-order furniture business built around a print catalog, and Gillis Lundgren, its fourth employee, was its catalog photographer. Getting a finished table from the workshop to a photo shoot meant fitting it, fully assembled, into his car — a logistics problem nobody at the company had set out to solve, because nobody had questioned whether furniture needed to travel assembled at all.
the move
Lundgren couldn't fit the LÖVET side table into his car for the shoot, so he removed its legs and packed it flat. Rather than treat this as a one-off workaround, he pushed IKEA to redesign the table — and then its wider range — to be manufactured, boxed and shipped disassembled from the start, with the customer completing the final assembly step at home. The Lövet table, sold flat-packed, became IKEA's first mass-produced hit product.
the payoff
Flat-pack became the standing design constraint for virtually every piece IKEA has made since: furniture is engineered from the outset to disassemble into a dense, stackable box, letting IKEA ship far more units per truck or container than an assembled-furniture competitor and stock warehouses and showrooms at a density no rival matched. IKEA credits the shift with pushing furniture prices in its category to what it describes as an industry low, and the company built from that model into the world's largest furniture retailer, with tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue.
what came after
Lundgren went on to design the BILLY bookcase, of which IKEA has since produced well over 100 million units, and the flat-pack principle he popularized in 1956 is credited industry-wide, including by Guinness World Records, which recognizes the Lövet table as furniture's first flat-pack product — the design constraint that still defines how IKEA, and much of the mass-market furniture industry that later copied it, engineers everything it sells.
filed under
references
- [1]The history of the revolutionary IKEA flatpacksIKEA, 2023ikea.com
- [2]First flatpack furnitureGuinness World Records, 2023guinnessworldrecords.com