Behind The Scenes: Ikea

CNet’s Daniel Terdiman interviewed Ikea product developer June Deboehmler and public relations rep Marty Marston, asking them to describe their Midas’ touch of furniture-making. Ikea has not only been able to build great-looking furniture for a number of years, but they’ve been able to do it en-masse and at very low cost to the consumer. He describes how carefully designed not only Ikea’s products are, but also the  streamlined process of production, packaging and delivery itself.

“We give them [the lead designer] all the parameters for everything the product should achieve,” Deboehmler said, “the costs, the look, the style group, that kind of thing. Then we have a brief discussion, and then give them time to go away to create sketches…Then we sit down and do the real drawings we work from.”

From there, Deboehmler, a lead designer, a packaging technician, and a field technician traveled to an Ikea factory in Lithuania and began work on the product on the factory floor itself.

With the Lillberg chair, the idea was to build a prototype at the factory–which the team did–and then to see what they had on their hands.

“After many, many days of trials, we thought we had it right,” Deboehmler said. “‘OK, this is the product.’ Our designer was on his hands and knees. Then we got it back to (Ikea headquarters in) Sweden and started taking it apart again, and decided we can make it better because we can fit more in the package if we changed the arm direction.”

By making a small tweak in the angle of the chair’s arm, she elaborated, the designers and packaging technician figured out they could get more of the chairs in a single shipping container, and that, in the end, meant a lower cost to the consumer.

“The arm (change) meant huge savings,” she said.

That’s the sort of tweak that evolves organically from the design process, and may be impossible to discover until the team is well past the conceptual stage.

“When you see something on paper, it looks great,” Marston said. “But it’s not until you touch it that you say, ‘Aha, if you turn it this way, we could get 10 arms out of this length of wood instead of 7.”

The Lillberg chair took the design team about 10 months from concept to completion, including manufacturing time and global shipments.

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