30 Times People Who Visited IKEA Could Not Help But Sum Up Their Experience In Hilarious Memes And Tweets

When I was a kid, the closest IKEA to where I lived was about 2 hours away. It’s hard to imagine that now because they seemed to have popped up anywhere and everywhere, but as a child, going to IKEA was a thrilling, all-day excursion. We would pile in the car and look forward to the meatballs, princess cake and kid stations the store had to offer the entire drive, and then spend the day exhausting ourselves looking at every inch of the store, enjoying a great lunch, and heading home with a car full of exciting treasures and three kids who needed a nap.

There’s no question that IKEA is a special place, but how much do you really know about the Swedish furniture empire? Well, let’s start at the beginning. IKEA was founded by Ingvar Kamprad in 1943, and its name actually came from a combination of the founder’s initials and the farm where he grew up, Elmtaryd, and his home village in Sweden, Agunnaryd. But the business model of IKEA has not always been the same. Apparently, the first “flat-pack” furniture set didn’t come along until 1956, when Gillis Lundgren, a draftsman hired by Kamprad, came up with the idea while trying to fit a wooden table into the trunk of his car by taking the legs off. The first IKEA flat-pack piece sold was the Lovet, a leaf-shaped side table, which was featured in their 1956 catalog.     

One of IKEA’s most successful items of all time is the Billy bookcase, which you might have in your own home right now! 15 of these basic, yet versatile, bookshelves are produced every minute, and over 41 million units of them had been sold by Billy’s 30th anniversary in 2009. If you lined all of those up, the Billys would stretch over 70,000 kilometers long, and I’m sure they’ve sold plenty more in the last 14 years! But alongside the Billy, three of the most successful ranges of IKEA furniture worldwide are Malm, Hemnes and Komplement.

If you don’t speak Swedish, most of the names of IKEA products probably mean nothing to you. They’re just exotic sounding gibberish that you likely avoid saying out loud so as to not embarrass yourself. But one thing that I realized while living in Sweden, and learning as much as I could of the language, is that many of their products are named after exactly what they are. Apparently, Kamprad was dyslexic, so he named his products using proper names and words that would make them easier for him to identify. “IKEA's curtains are given mathematical geometrical terms and bathroom products are named after lakes, rivers and bays,” Ideal Home UK explains.