Ikea If you haven't heard of Ikea, it's a Swedish home furnishings store almost as successful as Abba was. It approaches a cult following for many. It's a big box place with miles of aisles holding an endless supply of flatpack boxes full of furniture and other odds and ends. We've picked up a few items now and then from there; coffee and end tables, some sets of drawers, a couple of window blinds, kitchen utensils, various knick-knacks, storage containers and the like, and lots of food. What is amazing to me is the way they pack the stuff up. They call it flatpacks and the designs they use to pack so much into so little is as interesting to me as the actual product. Below are some images from about a 30 minute process. (more text below the images >) |
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Next > Starting to pull the goodies out. Everything is well packed with little wasted space. |
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Next > Here's the drawers in all their flat glory. There's a total of six drawers packed in here. There are parts packed within parts and all are stored so they don't scratch each other. I'm really impressed with the packing of this item. |
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Next > Here's the drawer ends - front and rear. The design is made so you can't put the wrong end on the wrong end. They only fit one way and it has to back in the back and top at the top. |
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Next > The sides have gone together by just snapping into the two legs at the bottom. The back slides in and is held with two simple plastic rivets on the bottom prior to locking into the top panel. |
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Next > Six drawer fronts with handles attached. The handles use screws to hold them on. There's only about 20 screws in the entire package. 12 for the handles and eight for the casters. |
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Next > Here's a drawer sides and bottom. It's perforated for easy bending. If you look at the top you can see little arrows that point down when the box is folded. |
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Next > Here's the fold beginning. The perforations are flexible enough so that there's no problem with folding the drawer accurately. |
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Next > And here it is folded with the front of the drawer attached. The front and rear are held on by a combination of slots and bent over tabs. The drawer is surprisingly sturdy when assembled and goes together with a minimum of fuss. |
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Next > The back of the drawer goes on and the tabs get folded over using a screwdriver. |
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Next > Almost there. Tab A into slot B and don't drop any parts. Note the half-full Margarita glass in the foreground. That really helps lube the assembly process. |
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Next > Yippee - it's together and makes a nice place for my OLPC to relax. |
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Top > And yes, here's proof that everything does in fact fit together with drawers that close and everything. There's a set of casters under to make rolling it around a bit easier. The casters don't swivel, which would have been nice, but the cabinet's small size makes it easy to move. |
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Ikea is an interesting concept. The store is set up to be a whole day event for the family. There's day care for the kids and restaurants for the family. The display area meanders around and around seemingly miles of stuff. There's arrows on the floor and arrows on the ceiling to keep you moving and buying. They have entire rooms and even houses set up with their products. They have a 500 sq. ft. living area with kitchen, sleeping, eating and resting areas, all furnished with Ikea. From the rugs on the floor, to the furniture on the rugs, to the pictures on the walls behind the furniture and a lot of the contents of the shelves and drawers; all come from Ikea. There's little kiosks with paper rulers, tiny pencils and shopping lists. You can measure what you see, write down what you want, then downstairs pick it up to buy. They have bags, shopping carts and even dollies to make sure you can move all your treasures out the door. Those I've been in are two stories. You walk around the second story treasure path, which takes you to their restaurant. It's full of pretty good at really good prices. Cake and coffee for $1.29 or a breakfast for $.99. They really want to keep you in the store and buy stuff and not waste time by going out to a regular restaurant. Finishing off the second floor, you wander the first floor filling your shopping cart with various odds and ends until you get to the miles of aisles of boxed stuff. This is one of the Ikea secrets. Flat packs. The vast majority of their stuff is packaged in so called flat packs. That means with you buy a bookshelf or coffee table or knick-knack box, it will come in a compactly fitted box that you have to assemble. We bought a couple of six drawer metal cabinets. So instead of Ikea paying to ship 5049 cubic inches and assembly, by putting it in a flat pack, they only ship 1338 cubic inches and rely on the customer to pay. Multiply that by thousand of items bought by thousands of people every day in every store and you have a recipe for success. As far as the product goes, it fits a particular niche. I like the design of most of their products. They have a clean minimalist design without a lot of overbearing gadgetry attached. The quality, to be honest, is only so-so. Ikea furniture isn't something you're going to hand down to future generations. A lot of the stuff is made of real wood. Real wood as in stuff that grows, but not real in that it's often glued up small strips. We have had quality issues. We bought some stainless flatware, (admittedly very cheap) that rusted after the first wash. Our last purchase was a set of LED spot lights whose connection from lamp to transformer didn't work too well. After returning the LEDs, I checked some display models and all the connections were quite loose. On the other hand, the coffee and end tables aren't too bad. They're made of glued up pine with an "antique" finish. I actually chopped about four inches in height from the coffee table and it works much better now. The metal six drawer cabinets are a bit flimsy, but I think they'll stand up to a fair amount of use. I see Ikea as great for supplying folks who live in small city apartments and move fairly often. You can completely outfit a small apartment pretty cheaply and then in a few years dump everything and buy again. |
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