IKEA

I also got a flat packed chocolate mousse. Woo hoo. I put it together this morning. It's very easy. It's three pieces. Oh, mousse like an animal, not chocolate mousse like the pudding. Yeah. That's correct. It looked really good at first, but, like, the sun rays came in my window. And within, like, ten minutes, it was melted and broke on the kitchen table. Oh, boy. Is there an analogy about IKEA furniture in there? I hope not. It was funny, though. No. I don't think so. I'm ready if you are. I'm ready. Let's do it. Welcome to the fall twenty twenty four season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal. And we are your hosts. When you're running an in person retail establishment, you know one thing for sure. If people are gonna buy your products, they have to be in your store. And more time in your store generally means they buy more product. So what is a great way to increase time in store? Meatballs, David. Meatballs. Meatballs and hot dogs. And hot dogs. We'll get there. So listeners, today we dive into IKEA, the company that sells over a billion Swedish meatballs a year and a lot of furniture and homewares to go with it. IKEA is an eighty one year old company. People visit their stores nearly 900,000,000 times a year, and it's quirky as hell. If you've ever shopped there, you're familiar with the crazy maze of showrooms. David, I spent five hours inside the Seattle store last weekend. I went there to prepare for this episode. I didn't realize that I was gonna spend the whole day there, but that's what happens when you go to IKEA. God bless you. Did you, make use of Small Land? I went with a friend who had a kid old enough to take advantage of Small Land. So yes. Nice. Perhaps you know the relationship test of can you make it through IKEA together, and that's just at the store, then you get home and you have to assemble all that flat packed furniture you just bought. But the furniture, it does look good Even though it's extremely inexpensive and you do have to build it yourself using the funny diagrams with the funny little man and the funny labels, it ends up looking pretty good. Hell, yeah. It does. And the results of this crazy stew of ingredients is that IKEA has become the world's largest furniture retailer and one of the largest retailers period. Today, we'll examine why it has worked so well, how its founder became the eighth wealthiest person in the world before shifting his ownership into a foundation, and how all the little innovations have just added up and refined the concept along the way. So whether it's the Poang chair, the Lack shelf, the Billy bookcase, it is very likely that you have something from …