The gospel according to Ikea

“We have decided once and for all to side with the many.”

Those are the resounding opening words of a little-known tract that underpins one of the fastest growing missionary organisations in the world. The book is Ingvar Kamprad’s A Furniture Dealer’s Testament; the missionary organisation is Ikea, which also happens to be the world’s largest furniture retailer.

Ikea, which did not begin to spread the word outside Sweden until 1973, now has 158 stores in 29 countries (Russia is the target this year); it employs 50,000 “co-workers”, and has sales worth £5bn. It has 10 megastores in the UK employing 5,000 staff, attracts 20m customers and expects sales here this year to be £700m. Last week it announced plans for 20 new UK stores, employing another 12,000 pink-shirted co-workers. All this at a time when traditional retailers – notably C&A and M&S – have been feeling the pinch. The company has a “sacred concept” and it appears to be working; pass me a copy of that testament.

“Happiness is not reaching your goal. Happiness is being on the way.”

A Furniture Dealer’s Testament is Ingvar Kamprad’s message to his co-workers. It was written in the mid-70s when the Ikea founder emigrated from Sweden to become a tax exile in Switzerland. Every co-worker should have one: it is the path to truth, the encapsulation of the sacred concept. Kamprad’s central ideas are further distilled in The Little Word Book (shades of Mao): humility, strength of will, simplicity, cost awareness, fellowship. The latter is described in Bertil Torekull’s authorised history of Ikea, Leading By Design, as “a kind of catechism; its explanations are in the spirit of Martin Luther’s teachings to the faithful”.

As traditional institutions – the Crown, the Church, Parliament, Marks and Spencer – have withered in the UK, Ikea has stepped in to fill the gap. It is more than a store, it is a religion; it is not selling furniture, it is pitching you a dream. “They have a cultural mission over and above selling furniture,” explains Alan Young, a creative director at St Luke’s, Ikea’s UK ad agency. “They want to create a better life for the many. They also want to ‘reach good results with small means’ [a quote from the Testament], and to achieve that you have to do things very differently.”

They do, indeed, do things differently. An Ikea store is not really a store at all: it is part museum, part shopping theme park. In a traditional, hierarchically-organised department store, everything is sectionalised: you usually head straight for the product in which you have an interest. At Ikea you are encouraged to do the whole tour, starting at the top and working down, following the arrows on the floor (the path to freedom?), taking the occasional signposted shortcut, turning back at your peril.

It talks of “visitors”, not customers; it offers a “shopping experience”, not a sales pitch. Every item is named in Swedish – dozens of names just for sofas, every genus covered: Aivak, Angby, Bala, Bredbyn, Bromsta, Bya, Dalarna, Ektorp, Falsterbo, Floda, Frösön, Haby, Halland, Karlshamn, Klippan, Kungälv, Laholm, Lulea, Lycksele, Nikkala, Strömstad, Sundborn, Tibble, Tomelilla, Tranemo, Vall, Vingaker. The taxonomy reminds you of a lovingly organised museum of natural history; this is the museum of the modern world. Purchasing is optional; this is about being, not buying.

“The general who divides his resources will invariably be defeated.”

Kamprad is now 74 and has ceded day-to-day control of the company to a hand-picked team of fellow Swedes. But he still likes to pay courtesy calls to his stores (the company remains privately owned despite innumerable offers), hugging his co-workers on arrival and making suggestions about the way the store is organised. He is famously thrifty, always flies economy, takes public transport, makes sure he uses his pensioners’ card, and prefers Ikea canteens to fancy restaurants. He is said to be fond of Scotland and once described him self as a “Swedish Scotsman”. He wanted his first UK store to be in Glasgow but was blocked by bureaucracy, of which he is less fond.

Kamprad, who is of German descent, was attracted to Nazism in his teens, a flirtation which he now “bitterly regrets”. “I have apologised to my staff and to everyone,” he said in 1998. “It was terrible but now I want to put it all behind me. Some parts of the media have tried to hang me because of my past. It hurts, but this is nothing to do with Ikea the company.”

He had a drink problem in the 60s – a lot of Ikea’s furniture is sourced from Poland and Kamprad seems to have started sourcing their vodka too – but has it under control and makes sure he dries out three times a year. “There are a lot of people in Sweden in my situation,” he said two years ago. “I have to clean out my kidneys and liver, and they should do the same.”

“By always asking why we are doing this or that, we can find new paths.”

Kamprad’s vision really is religious: the company exists to improve not just the lot of people, but the people themselves. Self-sufficiency is the watchword: you find your own way round the store, choose your goods with minimal assistance from staff, carry them to the check-out and the car, cart them home, and then assemble them yourselves. The company doesn’t do this just because it keeps costs (and thus prices) down, but because it is good for you. It makes you a better person.

“In this country we have a watered-down version of north American service expectations,” says St Luke’s Young, “but Ikea is almost anti-service: you play the game, you do it our way, you shop our way, you’ll do a lot of the work yourself. They ask a lot of the consumer.”

This was a tough idea to sell in lazy, pampered Britain and at first the sacred concept didn’t win many converts. Ikea’s first UK store opened in Warrington in 1987, but it wasn’t until the mid-90s that the company really felt it was making progress. The high-profile “Chuck out your chintz” ad campaign infuriated audiences, but it also appears to have worked: the chintz was chucked in favour of Ikea’s stark simplicities.

Preaching self-sufficiency was an uphill task in the UK because shoppers expected service: lots of staff on the shopfloor, and large items of ready-made furniture delivered to their door. Ikea’s flat-pack zealots were like the early Christian fathers faced with the pagan hordes, and the moral message was a tough one. “The idea is that you do half,” says Ikea’s PR manager, Shirley Jones. “We will supply you with the design, the inspiration, the knowledge and the basic tools; your responsibility then is to go home, build it and use it.”

As the company’s bizarre new “Tattooman” ad puts it: “This is the way of Ikea. The way it has always been.” Tattooman is like Moses, showing his co-workers the Promised Land; the flat-packs are the tablets on which are written, metaphorically speaking, strength, joy and achievement. In the ad, one of the co-workers suggests it would be better to scrap self- assembly, thus avoiding the nightmare of customers bringing back furniture that resolutely refused to fit together. Tattooman is not amused: he gets the staff to remove their shirts and sniff each other’s armpits. The moral: sweat is honest, work represents integrity, and it is good that Ikea customers are given a chance to sweat, too.

Self-assembly is a form of both divine worship and self-fulfilment: I screw therefore I am. It also saves you money, which in Kamprad’s worldview is another way of serving God. “We tend to put behavioural imperatives into the advertising,” says Young. “Ingvar and his creation are absolutist.” So absolutist that when the Bristol Ikea was opened last year, people with beards were banned from the store to reduce congestion. (It later transpired that this was a joke, though it is an interesting comment on Ikea’s idiosyncratic image that people took it seriously and beardists complained.)

“Part of creating a better everyday life for the many consists of breaking free from status and convention – becoming freer as human beings.”

The Ikea philosophy is optimistic: it encourages you to take control. An Ikea store is filled with boxes and bins: containers in which you can order the clutter of your daily life. You can win the eternal battle against chaos. There are dozens of bookcases and shelving systems, because everything – books, videos, CDs – must be in its place. The shoe-rack is a cult object at Ikea; it even sells a plastic bag dispenser to give you easy access to your previously random collection of plastic bags. Nothing is left to chance: order, classification and progress are the core of the Ikea ideology.

Ikea believes we can be educated and improved. Look at the display books (always in Swedish) on its bookcases: they are not just real, they are by great literary stylists – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Adam Mars-Jones. Look, too, at the products for children. There is nothing plastic or pretend; everything is solid and real. The children’s cooking utensils can go into ovens: they are made for cooking, not playing. Ikea children are being prepared for tomorrow.

“What we want to do, we can do and will do together. A glorious future!”

There are clocks everywhere in Ikea: time matters; it is there to be used fruitfully. Shopping is fun, but it also has a purpose – to improve our lives. We are buying not just a lifestyle, but a life. Look carefully at the room-sets, especially in stores where they have been minutely individualised: you know these people, understand their hopes, because you lead (or want to lead) these lives.

Ikea is preoccupied with relationships. Whereas traditional stores have usually appealed to individual consumers, Ikea wants to attract families or groups of friends. You often see not just couples trailing around, but the rest of the extended family, too: it is the modern equivalent of the day at the seaside in the 50s and 60s, a chance for the family to do something communally.

But Ikea wants to have it both ways. It knows that the nuclear family is disintegrating, so it seeks to appeal beyond its boundaries. Last year it ran an ad campaign, tagged “Make a fresh start”, that encouraged people in failing marriages to get divorced. It pitches directly to remarrying couples, to single parents (men as well as women), and to gay couples, who feature prominently in its advertising. Part of its optimism lies in a belief that the right relationship can be found; that dud relationships should be ditched; that you have to be yourself.

“We do not need fancy cars, posh titles, tailor-made uniforms or other status symbols. We rely on our own strength and our own will!”

Ikea hates the class system, hierarchies and deference. At its Brent Park headquarters – a flat, functional building on top of a multi-storey car park – its co-workers dress informally. Offices are open-plan and even the managing director, Goran Nilsson, works in a small room with glass panels to ensure visibility and accessibility. Staff are encouraged to be part of an organic whole and to challenge the corporate structure. Mistakes are not punished because, as Kamprad says, “only those who are asleep make no mistakes”.

In the UK, Ikea confronted the class system head on, in a campaign that told us to “stop being so English”. Young describes it as an extension of the chintz campaign. It ran in 1997, at the same time as Tony Blair swept the country, in effect encouraging us to be tough on chintz and tough on the causes of chintz. Ikea, like New Labour, was offering us a new beginning: clarity, classlessness, opportunity, a bright future. The store’s appeal seems to have lasted rather better than its political counterpart’s. But then, of course, it had a Big Idea. 

The quotes are from A Furniture Dealer’s Testament, by Ingvar Kamprad, which appears as an appendix to Bertil Torekull’s Leading By Design: The Ikea Story.

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