IKEA, every mention
388 scenes, the whole family · ← back to IKEA
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 211Ben Gilbert 174David Senra 3
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where IKEA comes up
10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:31:02 David Rosenthal Ikea.
- ▶ 2:18:10 Ben Gilbert Or it's Costco, but it's for furniture, like Ikea.
Trader Joe’s: Hawaiian shirts and counter positioning (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:02:19 David Rosenthal And then now his three separate foundations, kind of just like the Ikea structure from that episode, own Trader Joe's.
- ▶ 3:15:23 Ben Gilbert And on our Ikea episode, it said really important that it's family and foundation controlled.
- ▶ 3:26:54 Ben Gilbert I also think you'll probably like Ikea.
Epic Systems (MyChart) · Acquired
- ▶ 43:26 Ben Gilbert This is IKEA all over again.
- ▶ 3:27:46 Ben Gilbert She is singularly focused on making Epic great in her life, just like Ingvar Kamprad and Ikea.
Rolex (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:12 Ben Gilbert I think they're even more secretive than Ikea or Mars.
- ▶ 3:24:12 David Rosenthal Than Ikea, because Ikea is this rat's nest of all these different structures and all these different, you know, country foundations that they're in.
- ▶ 4:19:29 David Rosenthal It's totally an IKEA situation.
- ▶ 4:19:34 Ben Gilbert And in Ikea, we can see it in annual reports.
Mars Inc. - The Chocolate Story (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:36 David Rosenthal Maybe it's because we just did it, but I feel like there are a lot of echoes of Ikea in this one, too.
- ▶ 41:49 David Rosenthal It's like, uh, the KD furniture from the IKEA episode.
- ▶ 1:30:57 David Rosenthal The other aspect of the quality principle though, much like Ikea,
- ▶ 1:44:49 Ben Gilbert But as we've talked about from Ikea to our business here at Acquired, complete ownership, or at least board control in Meta's case, is freedom.
- ▶ 3:19:15 Ben Gilbert We said that IKEA doesn't have brand power last episode.
- ▶ 3:19:21 Ben Gilbert It might be technically true in that they don't take margin because of their, but they have to deploy their brand power in another way, in the same way that Mars, I don't think, charges more for a Snickers than a different candy bar.
IKEA (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 0:20 David Rosenthal Oh boy, is there an analogy about IKEA furniture in there?
- ▶ 1:24 Ben Gilbert So listeners, today we dive into IKEA, the company that sells over a billion Swedish meatballs a year, and a lot of furniture and homewares to go with it.
- ▶ 1:33 Ben Gilbert IKEA is an eighty-one-year-old company.
- ▶ 1:36 Ben Gilbert People visit their stores nearly nine hundred million times a year.
- ▶ 1:51 Ben Gilbert I didn't realize that I was going to spend the whole day there, but that's what happens when you go to Ikea.
- ▶ 2:06 Ben Gilbert Perhaps you know the relationship test of can you make it through Ikea together, and that's just at the store, then you get home, and you have to assemble all that flat-packed furniture you just bought, but the furniture, it does look good.
- ▶ 2:30 Ben Gilbert And the results of this crazy stew of ingredients is that IKEA has become the world's largest furniture retailer, and one of the largest retailers, period.
- ▶ 2:39 Ben Gilbert Today we'll examine why it has worked so well, how its founder became the eighth wealthiest person in the world before shifting his ownership into a foundation, and how all the little innovations have just added up and refined the concept…
- ▶ 2:54 Ben Gilbert So whether it's the Poang chair, the Lac shelf, the Billy bookcase, it is very likely that you have something from Ikea in your house right now.
- ▶ 4:15 David Rosenthal Well, as we will discuss later in the episode, including, you know, delivery and everything that comes with e-commerce, I don't know if it'll be cheaper, or it will certainly be impacting IKEA's margins.
- ▶ 5:20 David Rosenthal And small land, again, despite its sort of cutesy, friendly, IKEA-like sounding name, it's a pretty tough place.
- ▶ 6:06 David Rosenthal Appropriate to the province, and, uh, appropriate to IKEA, as we shall see.
- ▶ 7:04 David Rosenthal And that is including IKEA's major, major presence there in that town today, including the first soar, the IKEA museum, the IKEA hotel, et cetera, et cetera.
- ▶ 7:48 David Rosenthal And actually, do you know what IKEA's largest market is still to this day?
- ▶ 8:20 David Rosenthal And, uh, people would sort of joke later that this was IKEA's first mail order purchase, was the farm, and moving to Sweden.
- ▶ 11:45 David Rosenthal They arrive at the farm, and this is where Ingvar Kamprad, the founder, purveyor, janitor, sole embodiment of IKEA grows up.
- ▶ 11:54 David Rosenthal I mean, really, we say this on a lot of episodes, but Ingvar is IKEA, as we shall see.
- ▶ 12:07 Ben Gilbert The company wouldn't exist but for his exact personality.
- ▶ 15:05 David Rosenthal And that, listeners, is the only capital that ever goes into Ikea.
- ▶ 15:22 Ben Gilbert Ingvar always owned a hundred percent of Ikea.
- ▶ 15:27 Ben Gilbert He built it into the world's largest furniture store and one of the world's largest retailers, period.
- ▶ 15:34 Ben Gilbert Without anybody else owning a single share of the company, no outside financing, no debt financing, nothing.
- ▶ 15:43 David Rosenthal They own, I think, all of their real estate today, they own all this, I'm sure they probably use construction financing today, but, you know, they have twenty-five billion euros in the bank, like,
- ▶ 16:22 David Rosenthal He literally trades matchboxes to Christmas cards to pens to furniture to Ikea.
- ▶ 18:31 David Rosenthal I-K-E-A.
- ▶ 18:50 David Rosenthal So that's Ikea.
- ▶ 18:54 Ben Gilbert And he does put the first Ikea logo sign on like a little shed on the property.
- ▶ 19:01 Ben Gilbert It's simultaneously labeling the property by address then, in addition to saying this is where Ikea does business.
- ▶ 24:31 David Rosenthal So he does with furniture, what he's doing with all Ikea products at this time, which is he goes around, he sources some suppliers and he asked them if Ikea can be their agent to sell their furniture.
- ▶ 26:04 Ben Gilbert I was, because it comes up later in a key moment of Ikea that he's dyslexic, and it's why some, I don't want to spoil it yet.
- ▶ 27:09 David Rosenthal And yes, this is the beginning of IKEA product naming conventions.
- ▶ 27:15 David Rosenthal Do you know, though, I actually had no idea until I started researching what these sort of general naming conventions are within IKEA today?
- ▶ 28:11 David Rosenthal So anyway, Ingvar decides that he's gonna start all this off with his, you know, named pieces of furniture in the Ikea catalog that, again, are not his furniture.
- ▶ 29:05 David Rosenthal Famous, you know, Ikea sofa bed.
- ▶ 32:08 David Rosenthal And even better, the logistics and distribution for us, for Ikea, is just as easy as ever.
- ▶ 35:06 David Rosenthal So in this first national circular that goes out, he writes, you may have noticed that it is not easy to make ends meet.
- ▶ 37:07 David Rosenthal But the very beginning of it, the very first thing reads that the mission of the company is to create a better everyday life for the many people, the many, by offering a wide range of well-designed functional home furnishing products at…
- ▶ 37:51 David Rosenthal But none of them become IKEA.
- ▶ 37:53 David Rosenthal And the next reason why none of them become IKEA is none of them have a showroom.
- ▶ 38:00 David Rosenthal But before we tell the showroom chapter of IKEA, now is a great time to tell you about our presenting partner this season, JP Morgan Payments.
- ▶ 38:09 David Rosenthal We've been talking about how IKEA brought simplicity to a complex and fragmented customer experience.
- ▶ 38:46 Ben Gilbert And since we're in Ikea land, let's zoom in today on retailers, and specifically on a product that most of you are very, very familiar with, Tap to Pay.
- ▶ 40:36 Ben Gilbert Okay, so David, how does the first IKEA showroom come to be?
- ▶ 41:05 David Rosenthal Inevitably, though, as we get into the early 19 fifties, competition gets more intense among these mail order businesses like Ikea, and price wars start.
- ▶ 44:09 David Rosenthal Becomes the first Ikea showroom.
- ▶ 45:27 David Rosenthal I don't know that the customer base in the town of Elm was that important to Ikea itself.
- ▶ 46:31 Ben Gilbert The very first time there's, uh, food at an Ikea is the very first time there's an Ikea.
- ▶ 46:53 Ben Gilbert At that moment, the basis of the modern IKEA concept was created, and in principle, it still applies.
- ▶ 48:06 David Rosenthal Here with IKEA, for the first time, it is that concept you just described, Ben.
- ▶ 48:29 David Rosenthal A huge portion of IKEA's catalog subscriber base, they've now formalized it as the IKEA catalog.
- ▶ 49:19 Ben Gilbert The arrival of the IKEA catalog, and it positioned IKEA as this brand, this lifestyle.
- ▶ 49:24 Ben Gilbert It illustrated a life you could be living if you participated in the IKEA story.
- ▶ 49:45 David Rosenthal So they arrange for any IKEA customer to get discount tickets on Swedish railways to make the pilgrimage to Elmhult.
- ▶ 51:07 Ben Gilbert Yeah, so it's one of these things that, you know, on the one hand, we are, how many years into Ikea?
- ▶ 51:36 David Rosenthal This is, I would say, like, generation three of the IKEA business.
- ▶ 52:16 Ben Gilbert It's not this simple Swedish design that we think about as IKEA as today.
- ▶ 52:48 David Rosenthal I think there was some stat in the Ikea story that during the decade between the mid fifties and the mid sixties, I think three quarters of the farms in
- ▶ 53:01 David Rosenthal And so the customer base for IKEA and all their competitors starts to majorly, majorly shift.
- ▶ 53:55 David Rosenthal So on the one hand, this is like a total existential threat to Ikea's business.
- ▶ 54:15 David Rosenthal And Ikea, even though it's currently serving what is effectively the parent generation of these new customers,
- ▶ 54:32 David Rosenthal There's one more element of the IKEA model that needs to fall into place.
- ▶ 54:37 David Rosenthal And ironically, even though it is totally identified core part of the company today, it's a reaction to competition that drives it.
- ▶ 54:53 Ben Gilbert It is astonishing that, so far in the story, they've been shipping, like, full-sized, fully assembled armchairs in order to get them to your house.
- ▶ 55:02 David Rosenthal Well, remember, IKEA's not shipping it.
- ▶ 55:15 David Rosenthal In the early days, this doesn't really matter to Ikea, like, hey, it's all great, like, that's my supplier's problem.
- ▶ 55:22 David Rosenthal As the business is scaling, though, this becomes Ikea's problem, because it's a limit to scaling.
- ▶ 55:31 David Rosenthal So it's totally intertwined with IKEA taking on the furniture design itself.
- ▶ 55:47 David Rosenthal IKEA has become so dominant in Sweden at this point in time that it's monopolizing like a huge portion of all the furniture makers production output.
- ▶ 55:58 David Rosenthal And so the rest of the industry starts organizing against IKEA.
- ▶ 56:02 Ben Gilbert And IKEA is philosophically trying to drive down prices.
- ▶ 56:07 Ben Gilbert They want to create the furniture for the many, and their competitors are all trying to maximize margin and have kind of small businesses, because the whole furniture landscape, in fact, to this day, is very, very fragmented.
- ▶ 56:27 Ben Gilbert Pissed at IKEA for going to the furniture manufacturers and saying, what's the very best deal you can give me?
- ▶ 56:52 David Rosenthal IKEA does not have a direct competitor today in 2024.
- ▶ 57:07 David Rosenthal They start locking Ikea out of trade fairs, trying to limit their access to suppliers.
- ▶ 57:13 David Rosenthal They start pressuring Ikea's existing suppliers into not selling to Ikea.
- ▶ 57:21 Ben Gilbert And Ikea's not yet big enough where that fails.
- ▶ 57:25 Ben Gilbert That actually works, and the manufacturers just come to IKEA and say, sorry, the collective leverage of all your competitors is too large, and we're not going to serve you.
- ▶ 57:34 David Rosenthal Competitors even go to the Swedish government, and they lobby the Swedish government to limit IKEA's ability to circulate its catalog.
- ▶ 57:55 David Rosenthal To your point, it starts to work, and this becomes a real problem for IKEA.
- ▶ 58:00 David Rosenthal So, Ingvar, the company, they're like, alright, well, how are we gonna design our way out of this one?
- ▶ 58:38 David Rosenthal And this is the beginning of IKEA in-house designed furniture.
- ▶ 1:00:21 Ben Gilbert But certainly the company that gets credit for popularizing and growing the volume of flat-packed furniture being shipped a hundred X, a thousand X around the world is IKEA.
- ▶ 1:00:32 David Rosenthal And it's a nice little story, but I think what Ikea does is they go all in on this.
page 1 of 4 · 100 scenes per page · newest episode first next →