David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Just to illustrate, your point about 1955, they did six million krona. By 1961, they did 40 million krona. That’s almost a 7x in six years. So Ingvar starts looking around elsewhere in Europe to expand supplier production. Then in 1960, Ingvar reads in the Swedish newspaper that the foreign minister of Poland is coming to visit the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce with the express purpose of developing business relationships with Swedish companies. You might be like, okay doesn’t this stuff happen all the time? What’s the big deal? Well Poland at the time was a communist country behind the iron curtain. This was odd. Ingvar is like, well if we could find a way to work with the communists, we could probably lock up a lot of production capacity that nobody else is going to go through the trouble of getting. And I bet they can also produce things pretty cheaply over there and in pretty high volumes. In 1961, IKEA goes to Poland to help local manufacturers, state-sponsored manufacturers there set up furniture production of the IKEA designs. By the end of the decade of the 60s, Poland is producing 50% of IKEA’s furniture, including some of the first modern classics like the BILLY bookcase, the ÖGLA café chair. It’s the wooden, curved back chair, the iconic one. If I have it right, I think that design is actually based on a Polish chair design. Interesting.…

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