IKEA’s ‘democratic design’ starts from home visits

For IKEA of Sweden, the €32.7-billion retail furnishing major, the design work starts from people’s needs and designers’ visits to understand and learn about life at home.

The process of home visits to final development of products sold across its over 385 stores in 45 countries is referred to as “Democratic design.”

Almhult, a small town in Sweden, which is closer to the Danish capital Copenhagen (189 km) than Stockholm, which is 300 km, is where IKEA has its roots. Everything hinges on its founder Ingvar Kamprad’s guiding theme, “To create a better everyday life for the many people”.

IKEA, known for its minimalistic Scandinavian and functional designs, has a lot of back-end activity, before roll out into stores, making them affordable.

Its form follows function theme innovation and efficiencies have helped IKEA lower its prices every year. “We just don’t sell mattresses, we sell sleep to people. This is by understanding their sleep patterns and extensive interactions with customers before the product is rolled out. Unless we do this, we would not be able to make products that make our everyday life better,” says Tony Sandelius, New Business and Development Manager, Innovation, IKEA.

Sandelius and his team are working extensively on how new materials, digital and virtual technologies, down the line, will impact people.

Some of the work done by them for Virtual Reality, will soon be seen in operation as people seek to buy furniture and kitchen equipment.

Marcus Engman, Design Manager, explains how they decided to change the shape of glass bottle for water storage, based on feedback and used cork sourced from Spain to cap it, as is done for wine bottles.

“Understanding what people needs is the start point for our designs. The heritage of Scandinavian design is all about function, form and price. To this, we added quality and sustainability. Everything we sell at IKEA, we design from scratch,” Engman says.

Having sewn up plans to set up 25 stores by 2025 in India with potential investment of over ₹10,500 crore and 13,000 employees by then, IKEA has acquired land at Hyderabad and begun construction of its store, to be one of its largest, according to Patrik Antoni, Head Communications in India.

The company is planning to set up a temporary warehouse near Mumbai and to set up stores in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru in Phase one of nine cities planned. “As we do globally, we have begun home visits in India and soon we will come out with a findings report,” he says.

Coinciding with India launch, IKEA is set to introduce interesting products designed and developed with more than 50 suppliers, it has developed over the years. While the actual range of products is much bigger at about 30,000, each IKEA store has over 9,500 articles, Engman said.

Some of the exciting things to look forward from IKEA, include light weight ‘screw-less’ furniture, virtual reality-based experience to select new kitchenware, LED lighting systems, new generation air purifiers and mattresses, now undergoing testing at its labs.”

While IKEA management has set a target to be a €50-billion company by 2020, the growth in new markets such as India will play a major role.

As the company seeks to become energy positive, generating more electricity than it consumes, by 2020, it plans to set up rooftop solar units in Indian stores to begin with. Already many markets it operates, including Scandinavia, are energy positive with wind and solar units. IKEA has set up over 314 wind mills and 7,00,000 solar panels globally.

(The writers was in Sweden at the invitation of IKEA)