Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yës
You mean öf cårse?
Nordic nod of approval
How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
141–150 of 342 posts
Re: How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
#142For 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?
> BYDGOSZCZ sofa This may not even be that far off from reality, looking at the sort of names rando brands on Amazon often have...
At least BYDGOSZCZ is a real word in a real language
Re: How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
You really wanna get weird, there's those continents of Asia, Africa, and South America, full of different sounds to use for names. Ikea is Swedish, so they get to propagate Swedish culture to the rest of the world.
With a side of tasty meatballs.
I've had tasty meatballs. It was the lingonberry sauce that I was introduced from Ikea.
Re: How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is that rule number one or two in that naming things are hard?
Re: How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
#145Re: How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
#146For 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?
Just go to Polish IKEA and buy the Grzegorz table and Brzęczyszczykiewicz chairs …
> Brzęczyszczykiewicz
MAUL HALTEN!
Re: How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
#147Re: How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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---
Just to make things worse, the Scandinavian languages use different versions of what have historically been the same letters, and collate them differently. E.g. Norwegian has æ (Ä), ø (Ö), å, collated in that order. Technically the Swedish variants are not part of the Norwegian alphabet, but they're typically collated with their modern Norwegian equivalents. At least in Norwegian, ae, oe, and aa is also traditionally…
Which has resulted in this catastrophe:
Re: How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Malm was released in the 1980s: https://techvibeblog.com/what-is-ikea-malm-made-of/ Girl with the dragon tattoo was released in 2005
I believe you, but that site reeks of LLM generated SEO junk
Re: How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
#150> 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.
Holy crap that's my desk too, bought about 24 years ago. It's been a great desk. Gray frame with black work area/shelves. I guess at the time the name was funny too but I had forgotten it.
I didn’t even know the name for the longest time. It’s only when I wanted to buy some extensions that I realized the cult status of that model, and that’s not (just) because of the name. It’s a truly great design and a shame that it was discontinued many years ago.