It's been 30 years since Ikea, beloved, low-cost furniture retailer to the masses, opened in the United States. While many of the designs look freakishly similar to those of decades past, a few key elements have changed, namely the retailer's ability to offer customers furniture for even lower prices. On June 12, 1985, the Swedish store opened its doors in America for the first time in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania. Today, there are 40 Ikea stores nationwide. Among all of the changes, Ikea has managed to keep certain iconic products --like the BILLY bookcase, POÄNG chair, LACK table, KLIPPAN loveseat -- at pretty affordable prices. In fact, Ikea says the cost of making these products has actually decreased since 1985, making them less expensive for customers, as well. Marty Marston, Ikea U.S. Product PR Manager told The Huffington Post that Ikea's emphasis on "democratic design" (form, function, quality, sustainability and price) has had a huge impact on price. Marston said that around 2001-2002, Ikea stopped making certain furniture items out of solid wood, which decreased the price for customers.
"In 2001-2002, we went with this new, innovative method of creating the look of solid wood products, without using all of the precious resources of trees," Marston said (Ikea famously uses nearly one percent of the world's wood). "So while the legs of the LACK table used to be made of solid wood, they were now hollow." The product manager added that the inside of the LACK table employs a concept called Board on Frame. "The inside of the table is expandable, with heavy cardboard that looks like a honeycomb. It fills up the empty space with the cardboard accordion inside and it gives the table incredible strength." In addition to the Board on Frame concept lowering prices, Marston added that Ikea's way of packing and shipping items, called "flat packing," also helped lower prices for customers. So while those large boxes might be heavy and cumbersome, you can credit them for those affordable furniture prices. Follow Us On Pinterest | Like Us On Facebook | Follow Us On Twitter
IKEA hemnes single bed frame Ikea Hemnes single bed frame. Deconstructed, photos taken to aid reconstruction which is very simple. (Ikea memory foam mattress for sale... The on-demand economy has changed how we get rides, make meals, buy eyewear, and run errands. Now it's about to change how you decorate your apartment. This loveseat is from newly launching company Campaign. The furniture line delivers flat-packed furniture right to your door, and no tools are needed for assembly. Every piece of Campaign furniture is built according to UPS and FedEx size regulations: The sofa backs, seats, cushions, and frame fit in boxes within 1 inch of the maximum size allowed, saving customers from forking over an extra delivery fee. This midcentury modern style armchair took less than three minutes to assemble. Greycork is another young company rethinking how we buy, receive, and assemble the furniture that fills our apartments. Its founder comes from the logging industry, and grew up on assembly lines.
All the parts were designed to use as few factory resources as possible. Assembly for this couch takes about four minutes. Stunning Images Show the Earth's Imperiled Water Space Photos of the Week: Milky Way Dazzles in Zodiacal Light Bring Minecraft to Life With These Cheap 3-D Printers Brad Sewell has spent two days carrying a mysterious, unmarked cardboard box all over Manhattan. It’s about the size and shape of the boxes that hold 27-inch iMacs and, luckily for Sewell, it has a sturdy handle. He’s in town from San Francisco and visiting WIRED’s New York office, where he methodically unpacks the contents of the box and sets to work assembling varnished wood and cloth cushions. He doesn’t use a single tool. No screwdriver, no hammer, no tiny Allen wrench. Just his hands, slotting pieces together and screwing in four legs. Less than three minutes later, I’m sitting in a midcentury modern-style armchair. It’s attractive, comfortable, and affordable at $495.
Sewell describes it as “Design Within Reach, but at an Ikea price.” It’s part of a furniture line called Campaign launching today (and shipping units in November). With it, Sewell is taking a stab at redesigning how we buy, receive, and assemble the furniture that fills our apartments. Campaign is one of a few companies rethinking furniture, making it easier to buy and easier to assemble. Silicon Valley has leveraged our communications systems to rethink everything from making meals to hailing a ride. With a few keystrokes you can buy premium eyewear at home (Warby Parker), or get a week’s worth of pre-assembled gourmet meals delivered to your door (Blue Apron, Plated, etc.). Furniture hasn’t gotten the same attention. Given the immediate gratification and supreme convenience that’s come to retail sales, the way we buy furniture is horribly archaic. Sewell discovered this while moving to Boston from the Bay Area, where he’d worked on Apple’s manufacturing design team.
He needed a sofa and found that his budget led to two paths. He could go to a place like West Elm or Crate & Barrel and buy a couch that requires two men, a truck, and a hefty delivery fee to get home. Or he could go to Ikea, get a Karlstad, and spend an afternoon assembling it. Neither was particularly attractive. He founded Campaign to offer something better. Entrepreneurs haven’t give furniture delivery much consideration because the stuff is big—your sofa is probably the biggest thing in your apartment, and the biggest hassle to move—and not that sexy, from a tech standpoint. “I think some of the brightest minds in design aren’t going to the furniture space,” Sewell says. “Your smart minds are drawn to Apple, Boeing, Lockheed Martin. That focus isn’t making it’s way to furniture.”He was an exterior design engineer at Honda before a year-long stint at Apple in 2010, and realized he could apply tech and automotive industrial design principles—optimizing materials for weight, strength, and premium feel—to a $1,000 sofa.
If he could treat a couch more like a car and design something lighter and more compact than what’s on the market, he figured he could solve the delivery problem. This meant thinking about delivery first. Rather than making you wait for movers or an Ikea truck to show up, Campaign ships everything. Every piece is built according to UPS and FedEx size regulations: The sofa backs, seats, cushions, and frame fit in boxes within 1 inch of the maximum size allowed, saving customers from forking over an extra delivery fee. You could even come home to find it waiting at your door. It’s a lot like what Ikea did, except the Swedish juggernaut was designing around shipping containers while Campaign is aiming at FedEx. “On our whiteboard in the top corner, we have one, the price point, and two, the size of the box we’re shipping it in,” Sewell says. “We’re designing this around the logistics and the delivery, instead of thinking about it after the fact.” Other manufacturers don’t do that.
Early on, Sewell and his team ripped apart a bunch of sofas from Room & Board. The autopsy was ghastly: beneath the upholstery are piles of foam, fabric, and unfinished wood, slapdashed and stapled together. It’s a heavy and inefficient design, wrapped up in pretty fabric. Sewell didn’t want to cut similar corners. He and his team use a steel manufacturing method similar to what’s used in the auto industry. They’ve spent months re-engineering the frame to make it as light and strong as possible. It’s an ongoing, iterative process; since bringing the first prototypes to NYC, Campaign has whittled weight down by 20 percent. Sewell says the steel construction is about more than efficient shipping; He hopes Campaign buyers will keep pieces for years and pass them down to their kids. That’s why he chose the pared-down modern design, and it’s why Campaign will offer replacement covers. John Humphrey, who launched the flat-packed furniture line Greycork last year after he looked around his home and realized he “just wasn’t that happy” with his furniture, has ambitions similar to Sewell’s.
“I was moving from apartment to apartment, and it was such a pain to move furniture or go to the store again and set it up,” Humphrey says. “I thought it could be packaged in such a way that was a better experience.” Like Campaign, Greycork furniture is shipped to your door using standard shipping methods. Humphrey estimates assembly for his sofa take four minutes. Humphrey’s approach is driven by heritage: his family has been in the lumber business since the 1880s. When he was 11, he started working summers on an assembly line. Unlike Sewell, whose Apple and automotive background prodded his decision to reengineer sofas, Humphrey knew from experience there was a simpler, more efficient way to work with manufacturers. Along with his two co-founders, he met with the factories making parts for the big-name furniture brands and studied their equipment to figure out the simplest possible pieces for them to make. Greycork’s line—the brand’s second—is designed around that specific constraint.
The results are amazingly spartan: solid ash sofa legs connect, without any screws or nails, to a medium density fiberboard, which provides the base for couch cushions. To keep construction minimal and prices low—Greycork sofas will retail for $650—Humphrey’s sofas also don’t have arms. Both designers are trying to out-convenience Ikea, but neither seems to look at it that way. They aren’t so much usurping Ikea’s business as standing on its shoulders. “There are principles we borrow from Ikea, like the way we design the components of our furniture so that it can neatly fit into a flat box,” Humphrey says. Likewise, Sewell points out, Ikea proved that consumers are willing to put labor into products they buy. During one of our meetings he references The “Ikea Effect”, a Harvard Business School paper that found people assigned more love to products they built, even if only partially. Campaign and Greycork could harness that cognitive bias too, but in a fraction of the time typically required for Ikea assembly.