#285 1951 · IKEA (Ingvar Kamprad) · Furniture retailattack-invisible-cost
IKEA's founder couldn't remember his own product codes, so he replaced every number with a word — and it became the most recognizable naming system in retail
the problem
A large, ever-changing product catalog needs some system to identify items, and the standard system (a numeric code) is the one thing its own creator couldn't reliably use
background
Ingvar Kamprad founded IKEA in 1943 as a mail-order business selling small household goods, expanding into furniture from 1948 and publishing the company's first proper catalog in 1951. Like any mail-order catalog business, IKEA needed a system to identify each item — the standard approach, then as now, was a numeric product code, simple to generate and simple for a catalog system to sort and track.
Kamprad found he repeatedly struggled to remember the numeric codes for his own products, a difficulty that was later understood as a sign of his dyslexia. For a business built around a small founder-led team managing an expanding mail-order catalog, a coding system its own creator couldn't reliably use or recall was a real operational liability, not just a personal inconvenience.
the move
Kamprad replaced numeric codes with names drawn from a structured, memorable set of categories tied to Scandinavian geography and naming conventions: large furniture pieces are named after Swedish place names, chairs and desks carry Swedish men's names, garden furniture takes Swedish island names, and other categories draw from Norwegian, Danish and Finnish place names — a system organized enough to scale across thousands of products, but built around names Kamprad, and later anyone else, could actually remember and visualize rather than abstract digit strings.
the payoff
The naming system scaled with IKEA from a single Swedish mail-order catalog into a global retailer operating in more than 40 countries, with product names like Billy, Poäng and Kallax becoming recognizable brand touchpoints in their own right — customers routinely refer to IKEA products by name rather than category, a level of product recall a numeric SKU system would never have produced.
what came after
IKEA's naming convention is now widely cited in branding and design literature as an example of accessibility-driven design decisions producing better outcomes for everyone, not just the person the accommodation was originally built for, and the system remains fully in place today across IKEA's global catalog, generating regular media coverage decoding what individual product names mean.
references
- [1]Ingvar KampradUniversity of Michigan — Dyslexia Help, 2020dyslexiahelp.umich.edu
- [2]IKEA products are named the way they are because founder was dyslexicLADbible, 2022ladbible.com