David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Happiness for him was making things a little bit better. If he has nothing to make better, what’s his reason for being? Totally. This is the mindset that Ingvar and the company are going into the 80s with, and the 80s is just continuing this compounding. 1981, they open stores in France and Spain, 1983 they go to Saudi Arabia, 1984 they go to Belgium, 1987 they go to the UK, 1989 they go to Italy, and along the way in 1985 as we talked about, they opened the first US store outside Philadelphia, in Plymouth Meeting, right by King of Prussia, frequented it often as a child, outfitted my bedroom and my family room and everywhere else. The interesting thing about the US, though, which I was so surprised reading, because again IKEA has just been part of my life forever, it actually doesn’t work that well for a really long time. It opens with a bang. In 1985, they do this incredible marketing campaign in the Philadelphia area. Part of it actually was figuring out how it should be pronounced because in Europe it was IKEA, the way you would pronounce it as a Swedish person is IKEA, and the ad campaign they decided Americans are just going to pronounce it IKEA, so let’s lean into it. It was an I, a picture of a key, dash UH, so coming soon, IKEA. People knew about it because it had been in Canada for nine years. I think it had started in Nova Scotia. Actually I happen to know the founders of Costco made a special trip up to one of the Canadian IKEAs even before the founding of Costco, because they had so much respect for IKEA as a brand they admired. They wanted to go and see it and experience it.…

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