The humorist Sandra Tsing Loh once described her generational cohort as “today’s young, highly trained, downwardly mobile professionals: ‘dumpies.’ We’re just emerging from years of college only to learn that there are no jobs available for people with our advanced qualifications,” and thus no route to ownership of all their hoped-for lifestyle accoutrements. No, she’s not a millennial, but rather what she calls a “late boomer” in an essay that dates from the mid-nineties — a few years after IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad “came into Southern California, uttering those five immortal words: ‘Halogen! Impossible Price: $29!’ The rest was history. In that instant, we dumpies found our niche. We rose up and became the IKEA Generation!”
IKEA could expand so far out of its native Sweden thanks to the success of products like the LACK coffee table, the subject of the new Primal Space video above. Though small in scale and highly unprepossessing in appearance (and, let’s face it, a visual byword for cheap furnishings second only to the number-one-selling BILLY bookshelf) it’s long been a steady seller the world over, not least because its price, just under the equivalent of ten euros when introduced in 1981, has never been raised. To manage that, IKEA has had to use every trick in its book: not just the do-it-yourself “flat-packed” design it pioneered, but also non-warping particle board, honeycomb paper structures for maximum strength using a minimum of material, and even newly engineered leg-folding machines.
However briskly it sells, this particular product may be unfortunately named in an English-speaking market; “What they ‘lack’ is stability,” one interviewee says to Loh. Still, it remains emblematic enough of the corporate mission once articulated by Kamprad himself: “To create a better everyday life for the majority of people.” (“How many Republican politicians can say they’ve done that?” Loh adds. “How many Democrats?”) That extends to the design of IKEA’s stores, which offer only one path to follow all the way through, like an extra-large funhouse. As noted in the video, while this forces customers to pass every product — and thus every temptation to impulse buy — it also turns a visit into an experience unto itself, before the customer even reaches the cafeteria. Funny; I could go for a plate of meatballs right about now.
If you want to take a deep dive into the origin and growth of IKEA, listen to this three hour episode from the Acquired podcast.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
