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The naming business: Unraveling
the IKEA product naming mystery.

IKEA, the home of semi-disposible Swedish furniture and delightfully goofy product names.

COPENHAGEN, Nov. 6, 2003. Good company, good names? If you are like most IKEA shoppers, you don't have a clue where IKEA's bottomless well of goofy-sounding product names comes from or what they mean. Why is an IKEA desk called Jerker? Do you want to sleep on a bed named Gutvik? That's not a carving knife, that's a Smeltpunt. Well get ready, there is a method to the apparent madness.

Items for the bathroom like Apskar (a wash basin), Toftbo (a bathroom mat), and Sanni (a bath sheet) are named after Scandanavian lakes, rivers and bays--that seems appropriate.

Stuff for kids is named after mammals, birds, and adjectives. So if you buy your children a Smyg, they're getting a lamp named for a wren. And a child's desk is Fartful, which of course means "speedy" in Swedish.

Chairs have men's names like Roger and Joel and Luppio. And materials and curtains have women's names like Rosali and Lenda and Ingert.

In lighting almost anything goes. The names come from all over the universe: music, chemistry, meteorology, weights and measures, days, months and the seasons. Hence names like Erbium, Cittra, Stratosfar and Troposfar.

Bookcases are named after occupations, so you will find names like Bonde (peasant or farmer), Amiral (admiral), Kampe (fighter), and Styrman (helmsman). Garden furniture comes from Swedish islands, and kitchenware naming is supposed to originate, of all places, in grammar. For example Uttryck (cutlery) means "expression," Concis, a pepper mill, means "concise," and Trevlig, a cakestand, means "pleasant or agreable." After all, who cares about consistency when you have no idea what someone is talking about to begin with?

And now for the ultimate business naming question, where does the name IKEA come from? Are you sitting in your Klippan? The guy who started this serial naming spree is named Ingvar Kamprad. That gets us the I and the K. Well, Ingvar grew up on a farm called Elmtaryd. Now we have I-K-E. And Elmtaryd is in a town called Agunnaryd. I-K-E-A. And that's how this company got named. The only other thing we can say about Ingvar is that he made a rule that to this day is strictly enforced: it is forbidden for management to wear ties at IKEA. So at least we know IKEA can be tough when it has to be.