David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes, exactly. Oh man. We could make a million jokes about European regulation. Anyway, to your point, it starts to work and this becomes a real problem for IKEA. Ingvar, the company, they’re like, all right. Well how are we going to design our way out of this one? Turns out design is the answer. They start going to the suppliers, to the furniture makers, and they say, okay. We hear you that our competition does not want you to give your pieces to us you’re also giving to them. What if we give you a new set of designs for different furniture and you make those designs just for us? Separate line. Open up separate lines. Could you do that? Most of them say, well yeah, I think I could do that. This is the beginning of IKEA in-house designed furniture. Now the first “designer” who Ingvar sets to work on this is a former advertising draftsman named Gillis Lundgren. Ingvar had hired him originally to help Ingvar do the set layout and the photo shoots for the catalog as his assistant. Lundgren starts cranking out sketches of furniture designs for the manufacturers. Then as legend has it, all this is going on, then one night, the two of them, Lundgren and Ingvar, are taking down the set from a photo shoot. Lundgren says, well, he’s putting a table away. He’s like, oh God. This thing is so heavy. What a huge amount of space it takes up. Let’s just take the legs off the table and put them under the tabletop and then we can store all this stuff better. Ingvar is like a bolt of lightning has hit him. He’s like, oh my God, I have just received the last commandment from God about how to run this business. It’s like, yes, we take the legs off and it takes up a lot less space. My God, we can design these things to come off on purpose. And then when we have our manufacturers ship the tables to customers, they’re going to be able to fit a hell of a lot more of them in those trucks. Yup, and it’s apocryphal. I am sure something along the lines of this insight happened. There were many other companies that were doing flat-pack furniture before this, including the company we’ve talked about multiple times on this episode, Sears Roebuck, was flat-packing their catalog distribution in America. But certainly the company that gets credit for popularizing and growing the volume of flat-pack furniture being shipped 100x, 1000x around the world is IKEA.…

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