Gillis Lundgren stood beside a car with a colleague, looking into the boot. The wooden table in his hands was never going to fit. In the Guardian’s 2004 telling, set in Älmhult, Sweden, in 1956, he said: “Oh God, then, let’s pull off the legs and put them underneath.”
IKEA tells it a little differently. On one of its own pages, Lundgren had been sent to deliver a table to a photo studio for the catalogue, the car was too small, and he thought: “Why not take off the legs?” The versions don’t agree on the words. They agree on what it meant. The Guardian opened its piece with the line “Flatpack furniture was invented by accident.”
None of this makes Lundgren a minor figure. He was IKEA’s fourth employee, hired full time in 1954 as advertising manager, and he took product photos for the catalogue. He went on to design more than 400 IKEA products, the BILLY bookcase among them. When he received the Tenzing Prize in 2012, the jury credited him with having inspired, “with a sense of logistics and efficiency,” IKEA’s launch of flat packages on a grand scale.
But the IKEA Museum is careful about the rest. In its exhibition on the founder, Ingvar Kamprad, it says plainly: “Neither Ingvar nor IKEA invented the flatpack.” Its page on LÖVET, a coffee table in the 1956 catalogue that could be packed into a small flatpack, adds that LÖVET wasn’t even IKEA’s first self-assembly product. Three tables in the 1953 catalogue were.
IKEA had reasons to care about boxes before 1956. From 1952, the Swedish furniture retailers’ association warned suppliers that if they sold to IKEA, its members would stop buying from them. Cut off from the furniture everyone else sold, IKEA started designing its own. And by IKEA’s own account, as the company grew, so did the cost of shipping bulky tables and chairs.
When IKEA opened its store in Älmhult in October 1958, the plan handed to journalists described furnished, home-like rooms in the showroom and the chance to take some furniture home the same day, in flat packs. The customer now did the carrying, and then the building. In the Guardian’s words, the flat pack “eliminated the cost of shipping vast quantities of air,” and almost surreptitiously moved the work of putting furniture together onto the customer.
The buyer did not always enjoy it. In many countries where IKEA opened stores in the 1970s, the museum says, doing it yourself was a brand new idea. The instructions were hard to follow, and a missing screw became something to blame. Through the 1970s and 1980s, people joked about “IKEA divorces.”
In 1996 Michael Porter used IKEA in the Harvard Business Review to explain what a strategy is. “Ikea serves customers who are happy to trade off service for cost,” he wrote. And: “The more Ikea has configured its activities to lower costs by having its customers do their own assembly and delivery, the less able it is to satisfy customers who require higher levels of service.”