Ikea Case Study

We all know the trouble of moving into a new house/apartment -- packing up all the things, furniture, kitchen machines and fish bowls and storing them in a big truck which then takes us to the new home where we set them all up, most of them broken, the rest of them in a different color than the new home's curtains.

But there's a solution for that, two even, if you decide to buy new curtains or blinds (58 Euros each) for the windows. In any case, there may still be a better one, . . .

. . . a Swedish solution.

IKEA is an amazingly effective way of decorating your home in a charming and original way and spending your savings. IKEA has almost everything you need for a new home, and even more which until then you didn't even know you needed.

Founded by Ingvar Kamrad from a farm called Elmtaryd in Agunnaryd, Sweden (hence the name I.K.E.A.) in 1950, the name had alreay been registered as such in 1943, when young Ingvar realized - by selling matches to neighbors, then fish, Christmas ornaments, ballpens and pencils - that buying cheap products and selling them for slightly more money can be an effective way of making a living. The now famous IKEA catalogue began in 1950, when for the first time he sold furniture.

The industry was erected. Five years later specially designed IKEA furniture was produced, and put to pieces, so that it can be stored and transported easily, and put together at home, with a two page instruction sheet.

Between 1973 and 1985 fourteen stores were built all over the world, the last of which in the USA. Stores in Britain, Hong Kong and Italy followed, and now there are 157 buildings in 29 countries.

So what's the clue behind all this? Why is the Swedish solution so effective? And what's so special that every time we go buy something there, ten check-out registers are busy helping up to twenty people per line getting rid of their money?

The Swedish solution is easy, and once and for all shall be revealed here:

Whenever you go to the store to buy whatever you want, and decide on a certain sum of money to be your limit to spend, you will exit the building having spent more. (You will have gotten the blinds pretty cheap though.) You enter the building, look at the map which serves as a guide for all to know where they need to go, and go off into the only possible direction there is. Straight, following the arrows on the ground. By following them you have to go through the whole store, looking at wholly decorated rooms and all kinds of fabulously cheap decorations, smiling at you. When you come to the part you were looking for, the little cart will already have all kinds of stuff piled up in it that you picked up along the way: a pillow, a blanket, a picture frame and something you just can't remember what it actually is