IKEA built itself on design for the masses. Now it wants personality. Is that a paradox?

IKEA is making all sorts of changes, all aimed at one problem: its products are too mass-market, and they hold little appeal for people who can afford to spend more.

In the small town of Älmhult in southern Sweden, IKEA, the world's largest home-furnishings manufacturer and retailer, has built a museum. It opens to the public at the end of June. From the train station in the town center you can follow the signs, walk for ten minutes or so, and see IKEA's past and future.

The museum stands on the site of IKEA's first store anywhere in the world. IKEA employees like to recall that the place was once covered in stones. The store went up in 1943, in an Älmhult that looked as though it had nothing; the founder, Ingvar Kamprad, would later sit near the top of the world's rich lists. In fiscal 2015, which ended in August 2015, IKEA's 328 stores worldwide brought in €31.9 billion between them. Its catalog prints more than 200 million copies a year, second only to the Bible.

A week earlier, Ingvar Kamprad himself turned up at the museum — no small thing, given that he is 90 this year and has appeared at few events in recent years.

The museum records how Ingvar built IKEA, along with decades of catalogs and showroom settings. On the lower level, IKEA has also set out several kitchen concepts it showed at the recent Milan Design Week; they look avant-garde, full of change.

"Change" is indeed a word IKEA brings up more and more often. On June 8th and 9th it held its "Democratic Design Days" for the second year — two days on which IKEA unveils important new products with great fanfare, limited editions made with outside designers among them. HAY and Tom Dixon appeared at the launch. HAY is a young Danish home brand whose standing among younger shoppers keeps rising. Tom Dixon is a popular British industrial designer who works across disciplines; his pieces sit in the collections of several major museums, including New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Dezeen, the well-known design site, also livestreamed the event for the first time.

At "Democratic Design Days," of the two words standing side by side, each modifying the other, IKEA wants to give more weight to "design." It hopes the event will help shoppers "build trust in IKEA and its products, and the desire to buy them." It might also solve, or at least ease, the problem IKEA faces: its products are criticized as too mass-market, short on personality, and lacking in appeal for people who can afford to spend more.

The question is whether it can.

IKEA's own explanation of "democratic design" is plain enough: besides form, function, quality and sustainability, a low price counts just as much — which is about as classic a description of IKEA as there is. Yet plenty of designers still find it odd to set "democratic" next to "design." Kit Neale, the British fashion designer who has just finished the SPRIDD collection with IKEA, says democratic design may mislead: design is personal, while democracy concerns only what people buy.

Marcus Engman, IKEA's creative director, said in an interview with Dezeen last year that IKEA would put more focus on design from now on, and dig up more interesting designers and collaborations. At "Democratic Design Days" a few days ago, Engman said the advantage of this is that IKEA can "learn" from other brands and "open up its thinking."

When Marcus passed the microphone to Tom Dixon beside him, Dixon said he hoped his work with IKEA could go beyond the range of the company's traditional products. For years IKEA's products have fit into a clear grid of style and price, which makes development more efficient and also more confined. What Dixon will actually design for IKEA remains a mystery.

Mette Hay, on Marcus's other side, said their work with IKEA was "simple and also complicated." She is one of HAY's founders. This Danish home brand has clearly gone further on personality; it is used to designing a single product at a time, sometimes without counting the cost. At "Democratic Design Days," Hay devoted her presentation to the shopping bag she redesigned for IKEA, gray and green in place of blue and yellow. She tried to explain the choice with a dramatic turn of feeling — walking home through central Copenhagen after meeting Marcus Engman at the airport there, she saw many people on the street carrying IKEA's signature blue bags and suddenly felt this was the collaboration she had dreamed of — but she could not help adding: it is the simplest way to work with IKEA.

Her husband, Rolf Hay, HAY's other founder, was more careful. He said that at first working with a big company worried him a little, but now he finds IKEA very transparent.

Rolf Hay's worry was not groundless.

"Our mission hasn't changed — to create a better everyday life for the many people," Mikael Ydholm said in an interview with QDaily at IKEA's headquarters in Älmhult, "but our interpretation of that mission does change." Ydholm heads IKEA's Research in Life at Home unit. At around the time work on the museum began, IKEA decided to show more openly what this home-furnishings manufacturer and retailer has learned about the home, and Ydholm has gradually become one of its important spokesmen.

In early June, Ydholm was swamped. A large part of the program at this year's "Democratic Design Days," held June 8th and 9th, came out of his research unit.

Ydholm's unit and "Democratic Design Days" are after something similar: attention and talk about IKEA. For the third year running the unit published a report on life at home, with a few findings singled out — among them that in Shanghai, 49% of people think a good Wi-Fi signal matters more than having space at home to socialize. IKEA says the work used the anthropological and sociological methods Ydholm has mentioned on many occasions, which makes the report sound reliable, and fashionable.

Important as the discussion the report set off was held to be, Ydholm missed the first round of it. On June 7th, when IKEA's designers and heads of product development sat down to work out which new products might grow out of the findings, he was busy curating and installing the exhibition.

After last year's report on kitchens and dining rooms, Ydholm and his team realized it may have been too abstract. They wanted to try new ways of presenting the work — putting on a more visual exhibition, for one. "Democratic Design Days" is, after all, one of IKEA's rare chances to show the outside world its innovation and energy across the board. IKEA adds a fair number of products every year, but among the 6,000 to 9,000 items a store carries, the new ones do not stand out.

Besides showroom settings and the temporary shelters IKEA designed and built for refugees, some fresh installation pieces served to present IKEA's views on "home" and on living — urbanization, mobile lives, the intrusion of the internet.

None of these ideas is new, and IKEA has only just begun raising them as something that matters. Asked about this, Ydholm looked a little uncomfortable and explained: "One possible answer is... we pay very close attention to people's needs, to product development. In Sweden, in the Nordic countries, we have this tradition, very practical, very close to nature, so one possibility is that we underestimated how important it was to bring in technology. We hesitated. You can criticize us for taking too long, but now we see how important it is, and I want to stress that we don't just want to put technology into the home."

Under the weight of tradition, change really does not come easily. All the more so because tradition is what brought IKEA such thorough success.

Still, the new Life at Home Report did make one deliberate change in how it was presented. In the past, Ydholm's unit picked scenes to study — the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, the dining room — and the products tied to those scenes became sales priorities for the coming fiscal year. The new report takes on a few broad questions instead: space, belongings, place and relationships.

"We deliberately didn't set up functional scenarios; we wanted to discuss 'home' more openly," Ydholm said. "It's interesting to put yourself in an unknown place. Deciding to focus on just one area is easy." But around the same time as "Democratic Design Days," meetings on IKEA's business priorities for fiscal 2019 were also under way.

Limited editions with outside designers were never part of IKEA's business plan either. IKEA employs only 16 designers on a long-term basis worldwide; most products come out of project-based collaborations. Even though Engman tried to take a few more risks over the past year in finding designers and partners, IKEA markets these collections so little, next to the designer collaborations of H&M or Uniqlo, that they have made no great impact.

Some believe this is because IKEA wants to build a more organic system. Unlike home brands that sign royalty deals with designers, IKEA usually pays a single design fee; designers earn nothing from a product's sales, and the designs belong entirely to IKEA — and IKEA has far too many products already.

Some also put IKEA's caution down to Nordic tradition. In his novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks, Aksel Sandemose set out the customary law of Jante, a fictional Danish town: do not think you are special, do not think you are better than "us," the collective. This "Law of Jante" has since been taken to lie deep in Nordic tradition.

Kit Neale, one of the designers collaborating with IKEA, runs a four-person studio in London and has done packaging for Coca-Cola. He tries to work out how "democracy" enters "design" at IKEA: "For a designer, democracy probably just means IKEA gathers a group of people to work and talk, and IKEA won't single any one of them out."

But the fact is that once IKEA opened up, everyone wanted a share of the light. Stéphane Halmaï-Voisard, who runs undergraduate industrial design at ECAL, the University of Art and Design Lausanne in Switzerland, and once worked at IKEA, went to Marcus Engman and proposed a project with ECAL's second-year industrial design undergraduates. They designed 50 objects students consider necessary in an apartment. The results went into the exhibition for the Life at Home Report. Halmaï-Voisard and the design students involved hoped that, at best, IKEA would pick some of them to produce. If that came to nothing, they might take the work and show it elsewhere.

There is no doubt that a home brand with this much pull in markets around the world can take a designer to a much bigger market.

The French fashion designers Pınar Demirdağ and Viola Renate got an email a year ago inviting them to work with IKEA. The two are known in small circles and have designed for Adidas. What pleases Renate most now is that her friends in Los Angeles can buy her products at their local IKEA store. Her audience, in other words, is several times larger. At "Democratic Design Days," Renate sold herself rather hard; the event looked like the trade show where designers can meet the most people.

Yet IKEA opens up just as little in these partnerships. Demirdağ and Renate are responsible for the prints alone; IKEA decides which products the prints go on, and the newest of them include T-shirts and gift stationery.

What is not in doubt is that, to meet the challenge from new home brands, this international giant has a clearer message to send: besides a sense of history and authority, IKEA also wants to prove it is a company full of energy, not nearly as conservative and bloated as some describe it.

"You have to dare to leave behind the things that belong to the past, and embrace more possibilities." Ydholm repeated this as the interview ended — perhaps IKEA's new reading of "creating a better everyday life for the many people." But the things that belong to the past have also proved that IKEA's strategy works. That may leave the real change less firm and less urgent than it looked at "Democratic Design Days."

Kit Neale thinks fashion designers make IKEA's products look more distinctive, though he also worries a little about whether outlets like Dezeen will care about home products made by a fashion designer.

Claesson Koivisto Rune, a design practice in Stockholm that has worked for more than 70 brands, Iittala and Muuto among them, will not consider working with IKEA, because IKEA pays designers only a one-off fee; the studio thinks that unless IKEA changes this, most designers will hold back. And whatever change IKEA plans may stay on the surface.

For IKEA, though, the relation between design and manufacturing often runs the other way. At the launch, the designer of the PS collection carried out a 3D chair. It is a coming IKEA product, and the designer said it was only on a visit to a supplier that they realized, "we can use this technology" — in function and in cost alike.

Cover image source: cocolapinedesign.com