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How does IKEA come up with names for its products?

ikea.com

61–70 of 342 posts

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

#61

Amazing. A post asks a question in the title that I actually want answered, and then goes on to answer that question clearly and succinctly. Maybe the best corporate content I've seen this year.

May I introduce you to the UK chain Iceland and their stance on management consultants? https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-story/the-dark-ages/beware-m...

The entire section of the website about 'The Dark Ages' is priceless. They don't pull any punches: https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-story/the-dark-ages/

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

#62
post #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.

Scandinavia and the Nordics are quite fancy and refined for Americans. Lagom, hygge, fika, the minimalism, the enlightened equality and solidarity, good education, little crime, highest happiness ratings, even prisons are like hotels, etc makes it a kind of imagined lifestyle that's cozy and thoughtful and so on.

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

#63

Amazing. A post asks a question in the title that I actually want answered, and then goes on to answer that question clearly and succinctly. Maybe the best corporate content I've seen this year.

May I introduce you to the UK chain Iceland and their stance on management consultants? https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-story/the-dark-ages/beware-m...

Brilliant.

Submit it to Hacker News as its own post before I do.

Seriously.

You have one hour.

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

#64

Amazing. A post asks a question in the title that I actually want answered, and then goes on to answer that question clearly and succinctly. Maybe the best corporate content I've seen this year.

May I introduce you to the UK chain Iceland and their stance on management consultants? https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-story/the-dark-ages/beware-m...

This is fckn brilliant!!

I’m bookmarking it for sharing

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

#65
post #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.

Could also be Vietnamese, they are big on diacritics.

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

#66
post #13

For a Swede it must seem kind of strange to understand the product names. You see an ACORN toy, a NIGEL bookshelf, and the CROYDON sofa... which sounds like it belongs in a council estate flat. Definately more fun would be the Polish version. How many people can pronounce the BYDGOSZCZ sofa, the PRZEMYSŁAW bookcase and the PSZCZOŁA soft toy?

Ikea mobile application has little speaker near the product name that invokes pronunciation - sadly, that's not available on desktop site. I still tend to read Swedish accented letters in these names as German umlauts.

So that wouldn't be a problem if Polish names would be provided with audio examples.

By the way, the communistic period here was full of products using regular words, name of places or people’s names. We had Wisła, Bieszczady wall units. First Polish color TV was Jowisz (Jupiter); first TV ever my mother had was called Szafir (Saphire). Then Szarotka (elderweis) or Sylwia radios from 50s and 60s respectively. A clone of IBM PC with Intel 8086 (or with Russian clone) from 1986 was called Mazovia - Mazowsze which is a historical region of Poland, same name was also used for DOS encoding for that machine.

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

#67

> 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?

> I don’t know Swedish. Is it because these diacritics make the names seem more exotic? of course. Haagen Dazs, Motorhead, etc have known it loooong ago

Pöyzen Böyzen

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

#68
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the goal is something that reads weird for most Europeans, then try picking names from Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, or Welsh.

My missus is Hungarian, I'm sure it's a lovely language but it just sounds like Klingon to me. Which makes it hilarious when she's annoyed at the boy.

The fact that Sz in Hungarian reads as s and other way around, S becomes sh - is mind-boggling especially for Poles, where Sz is pronounced as sh. and S remains s.

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

#69
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Scandinavia and the Nordics are quite fancy and refined for Americans. Lagom, hygge, fika, the minimalism, the enlightened equality and solidarity, good education, little crime, highest happiness ratings, even prisons are like hotels, etc makes it a kind of imagined lifestyle that's cozy and thoughtful and so on.

That's how they getcha, and then go full midsommar...

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

#70
> Did you know that we name around 2,000-3,000 new products every year?

It's more likely that the whole product catalog contains 2-3k products. [1][2][3] So no, you don't.

[1] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/cat/products-products [2] https://lar5.com/ikea (~ 2200) [3] https://namingschemes.com/Ikea_Product_Names (~ 1300)

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