Opposite is the world’s first Ikea store, opened in 1958. This place must have
looked like a spaceship back then, now, it looks like every other Ikea I’ve
ever seen: a big blue and yellow shed with flags outside. Indeed, the single
worst thing about Ikea, worse than the mystifying self-assembly
instructions, is the external appearance of its stores. “There is a terrible
pathos,” says design guru Stephen Bayley, “about Ikea’s idealism for good
design for everyone and the brute, corrupting ugliness of its presence
wherever it goes.” That may be harsh and yet, although Ikea says cheap and
beautiful need not conflict, when they do, cheap always wins. If a designer
is asked to produce a chair to sell at £10 and comes up with a wonderful £12
chair, she either redesigns it or it doesn’t get produced.
Of Älmhult’s population of 9,000, 3,500 work directly for Ikea. It is not the
headquarters – that is in the Netherlands for tax purposes – but it
is, insiders say, “the heart of Ikea”. Indeed, in the curious
way co-workers have of echoing each other, they all use that same phrase. No
surprise: managers from around the world come to Älmhult to learn the
essentials of the Ikea story. Ikea is very big on its story.
In the museum, Juni Wannberg, with the company since 1984, tells me that
story. Ingvar Kamprad, the founder, grew up on a farm outside Älmhult.
Älmhult is in the Småland region, and Smålanders are famed throughout the
country for their informality, entrepreneurial spirit (Brio, the toymaker,
also started here) and thrift. Especially their thrift: the Ikea catalogue
is shot here, using employees as models. A lot of advertising is also done
in-house. Managers fly economy and sometimes have to share hotel rooms. And,
as any visitor to Ikea will know, staffing levels are hardly generous.
It’s hard country, rocky, with poor soil. A century ago, many Smålanders left
for America. Those who stayed had to graft. Kamprad’s grandfather ran the
general store, while his father was full of business ideas. “What a great
combination for a little guy!” enthuses Wannberg. Indeed so: Ingvar was an
uncommonly enterprising boy. His aunt sent him bulk quantities of matches
from Stockholm that he broke up and sold to locals at a profit. He launched
the catalogue as a single-sheet mail order flyer (last year 191 million
copies in 27 languages were produced, one of the biggest print runs in the
world). Then he opted to concentrate on furniture, took on the established
cartels by buying direct from small producers, brought in Danish designers,
discovered flatpack (by accident) and steadily expanded through the Fifties
and Sixties.
Wannberg does not mention that Kamprad was, it seems, a friend and supporter
of Per Engdahl, leader of the neo-Swedish movement, a wartime pro-Nazi
party, nor that Engdahl was a guest at Kamprad’s wedding to his first wife
in 1950. Kamprad has called this flirtation with fascism the “greatest
mistake of my life”, and says his German grandmother indoctrinated him. It
is a rare blot (albeit a large, ghastly blot) on what is generally a good
press. Still, some critics cringe at Kamprad’s folksy paternalism, detecting
an echo of his youthful taste for totalitarian politics. “We do not only
want to be manufacturers and retailers,” says one Ikea brochure rather
creepily, “we want to be part of your life.”
Kamprad got into low-cost supply very early, doing a deal in Communist Poland
in the late Fifties. The Poles, apparently, warmed to Kamprad’s informality
and his ability to drink. Poland is still Ikea’s second biggest supplier,
the biggest being China, which accounts for more than a fifth of
procurement. The chain’s purchasing power is such that it is estimated
to make an extraordinary 18 per cent profit on sales, this despite passing
on a large chunk of its cost savings to the customer. Ikea does not have any
shareholders.Its ownership is shrouded in a series of foundations and
trusts, but it remains a private company under, no one doubts, the control
of the Kamprad family. The founder himself, now 82 and living in
Switzerland, comes to Älmhult every Christmas to make a speech.
Back in London, I meet Olivia Szdjnaa, 24, Tania Hamilton, 20, and Melissa
Hurring, 25, all on the first rungs of the Ikea management ladder. Their
youth is no accident. The average age of Ikea store managers is 32, and it
is very big on harnessing the energy and enthusiasm of youth, an enthusiasm
that can verge on passion, even idealism. Ikea’s training internally and
advertising externally assiduously maintains its
status as an oppositional brand, an outsider, a cult. Its propaganda uses
radical, sometimes leftist imagery: polo players contrasted unfavourably
with kids playing football; a silver salver of caviar under the words “for
the few” up against a page full of hot dogs, “for the many”.
These three young women talk in glowing terms of their employer: the Christmas
gifts, the social outings, the lack of a hierarchy, the opportunity to
switch jobs. Ikea has been called a “Marmite” brand (you love it or hate
it), yet while plenty of people moan about wobbly tables, the firm does not
incur the opprobrium directed at other global multiples. Indeed, in a
customer satisfaction survey carried out by Verdict research, Ikea came
third in the retail sector after Waitrose and John Lewis. Part of the reason
for this popularity is that Ikea’s staff are such zealous ambassadors for
their employer.
Szdjnaa, Hamilton, Hurring and I drive to Ealing in West London. We are going
to see Boyd Chung, a 32 year-old Malaysian IT consultant, as part of the
firm’s market research into how we use our homes and what products we want
in them. “What are you happy with?” they ask Chung. “Nothing,” he says,
gesturing helplessly around a flat overflowing with books, magazines,
filing, electronic kit. It strikes me that a big part of Ikea’s success is
simply that we have much more stuff than we did 20 years ago, and need
somewhere to put it all.
It rapidly emerges that Chung wants to be told what to do. One of the reasons
he likes Ikea, he says, and I heard this time and again, is “it is easy to
navigate”. The Ikea pathway, the line of bossy blue arrows that forces you
through the whole store, is much vilified. If you hate Ikea, even if you
don’t hate the queues and the self-assembly, you certainly hate the line.
And yet direction is precisely what many customers want. “My wife and I go
there once or twice a month, for recreation, window-shopping, inspiration,
and to see solutions to our problems,” says Chung. “My friends here and
in Malaysia all go to Ikea.”
Chung and his friends are part of an expanding global middle class,
meritocrats defined by mobility and pragmatism, people with similar taste,
regardless of race, religion or country of origin. The Ikea fan in Milton
Keynes probably has as much, if not more, in common with the Ikea fan in
Moscow or Monterey, than with her own compatriot who goes to MFI. What sells
well in one country sells well in another; what flops in one place tends to
flop everywhere. The average spend per store visit ($85 in 2005) is the same
in Russia as it is in Sweden.
One-size-fits-all is the essence of the Ikea business model. To benefit from
economies of scale, you can’t be tweaking products to suit local tastes.
Stephen Bayley bemoans this homogeneity: “Products should have national
characteristics, that’s what people love.” But is it? Peter Högsted, sitting
up there in his spare, functional HQ in Wembley, thinks not. “There is this
thesis that we are all so different,” he says, “but we are not.”
