IKEA's one-way maze is designed to walk you past everything it sells
Most shops let you head straight to what you came for. An IKEA store usually steers you counter-clockwise along a single route the company calls the long natural way, through furnished living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms, before you reach the shelves and the warehouse. Shortcuts exist, but the design wants you to see it all.
The walk is carefully ordered. Upstairs, showrooms are laid out in the sequence of rooms in a house, each dressed with lamps, rugs, cushions and cutlery so you can picture the furniture in use. Downstairs is an open-shelf marketplace for smaller goods, then a self-service warehouse where you collect flat-packed boxes yourself. Just before the tills sits a bargain corner of returns and ex-display pieces sold at a discount. The blue and yellow buildings borrow Sweden's national colours.
It all began small. In 1943 Ingvar Kamprad, then 17, started a mail-order business and five years later began reselling furniture. The name joins his initials to Elmtaryd, the farm where he was born, and Agunnaryd, the Småland village where he grew up. The first store opened in Älmhult on 28 October 1958, and the town is still the company's operational heart, home to product development, design and the IKEA Museum.
Expansion was gradual: Norway in 1963, Denmark in 1969, Switzerland in 1973 as the first store beyond Scandinavia, then West Germany and Japan, the United States in 1985 and Britain in 1987. The biggest store of all opened in 2021 at the Mall of Asia complex near Manila, covering 65,000 square metres. Since 2008 IKEA has been the world's largest furniture retailer, and in fiscal 2024 it sold €45.1 billion of goods through more than 500 stores in 60 countries.
The low prices rest on flat-pack furniture, constant product development and tight cost control. The printed catalogue, however, did not survive: after 70 years it stopped publication as the pandemic cut demand.
Source: IKEA
