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How does IKEA come up with names for its products?

ikea.com

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Re: How does IKEA come up with names for its products?

#51

> preferably contain the letters Å, Ä or Ö Yes, but why prefer these letters? I don’t know Swedish. Is it because these diacritics make the names seem more exotic?

Not sure why, but when I see certain diacritics with latin alphabet, my brain tries to place the language somewhere in Europe. I don't know if I can call that an exotic feeling but it certainly feels foreign.

Re: How does IKEA come up with names for its products?

#52
This is so random. I had just pulled this exact page up this morning to settle a debate with coworkers over whether the product names were real Swedish words or not. I thought they were all made up!

Was very surprised to find things like “bookshelves are all men’s names”, “all names must have ä, å, or ö”, etc.

Complete coincidence that this is #2 today. Had to check that ’NaOH’ wasn’t one of my coworkers

Re: How does IKEA come up with names for its products?

#54
post #24

> preferably contain the letters Å, Ä or Ö Yes, but why prefer these letters? I don’t know Swedish. Is it because these diacritics make the names seem more exotic?

Those are the letters we have that are distinct from English. Not exotic to us, but yeah, "weird letters" is probably considered part of the international brand now. By the way, we consider them unique letters, not A and O with diacritics. The Swedish alphabet goes …XYZÅÄÖ. Oh, and I just learned that we only officially added W in 2006. Before that, it was considered a variant of V. We still pronounce them the same,…

Huh, interesting that they are collated at the end. These differences also makes sorting language dependent.

In Hungarian it's A, Á, B, C, Cs, D, Dz, Dzs, E, É, F... So Cu--- comes before Cs---

Re: How does IKEA come up with names for its products?

#55

> preferably contain the letters Å, Ä or Ö Yes, but why prefer these letters? I don’t know Swedish. Is it because these diacritics make the names seem more exotic?

Most likely. In the early 90s there was a knock-off of Ikea called Stør which used the ø for exoticism. I had assumed that it was a Danish company, but apparently, not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STØR (The store where I bought some of my first furniture from—off the 60 in City of Industry—was quite possibly the original location).

Re: How does IKEA come up with names for its products?

#56

> Every possible product name is carefully checked to avoid undesirable meanings in other languages, political or religious affiliations and fit into our global profile. I love the JERKER desk that I bought 26 years ago, so I assume this rule must be younger than that.

An excellent desk, by the way. I still have mine (the old heavy duty model)!

Re: How does IKEA come up with names for its products?

#58
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its not all that strange tbh - im learning danish which is adjacent enough to swedish that I can understand most of the names - sometimes they aren't relevant to the product function, sometimes they are, but they're just names. Is it strange to you that the word "photoshop" uses english language? what about a Hamburger being named after a place?

Nitpicking but your examples all have a clear etymology that may even help you deduce the purpose of a thing. Hamburger means 'from Hamburg' and can be short for 'in the style of Hamburg', which sounds perfectly normal to a native. This is, would I say, less strange than if it was named 'Hamburg', which seems to be the case of IKEA furniture. Photoshop, in the same way, seems to refer to a photo workshop, which once…

GNOME used to give software applications names of common nouns that were usually not strongly related to their function: Nautilus, Palimpsest, Totem, Tomboy, Seahorse. At some point I think they decided to move away from this because they found many users had a hard time remembering the names.

Re: How does IKEA come up with names for its products?

#59
post #22

> Every possible product name is carefully checked to avoid undesirable meanings in other languages, political or religious affiliations and fit into our global profile. I love the JERKER desk that I bought 26 years ago, so I assume this rule must be younger than that.

Perhaps even the source of that rule.

Pax is another one that violates the rule that someone pointed out lower. Also Malm is a surname which is another violation of the rule (one of the characters in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was named, if I recall correctly, Stefan Malm). I remember reading the books with my then-wife and she said it was like reading an IKEA catalog. I thought she was referring to the character/place names, but it turned out that the second book had a long section where the titular girl furnishes an apartment from IKEA and—that chapter was exactly like reading an IKEA catalog.
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