Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Generation two is furniture plus catalog. Now we’re here in version three of furniture catalog plus showroom, and that’s what’s really explosive. But here in the 50s, though, the target customer base—we referenced this a minute ago—and the product mix is still geared towards these rural farmland families, like hey, I’m outfitting my farmhouse. Yup, and when you look at the old catalogs, you can tell. It’s not this simple Swedish design that we think about as IKEA as today. It’s pretty rugged, robust, heavy furniture. Yes. When the 1960s come around Sweden, like pretty much all of Europe, starts rapidly and inexorably urbanizing. The automobile becomes commonplace, farms are closing down, young people are moving into cities and suburbs. They’re taking jobs in factories, they’re taking white collar jobs, other blue collar jobs. I think there was some stat in the IKEA story that during the decade between the mid-50s and the mid-60s, three-quarters of the farms in Sweden closed down. It’s wild. But this is happening all over Europe. The customer base for IKEA and all their competitors starts to majorly, majorly shift. It’s no longer families setting up their farms or taking over the farm from the elder generations. It’s now a whole new lifestyle of modernity in the cities, in the suburbs, smaller houses, modern houses, electricity, apartments.…

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