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Posted by NaOH 22 hours ago

How does IKEA come up with names for its products?(www.ikea.com)
419 points | 295 commentspage 6
jansan 21 hours ago|
I love how the chose Verde, which means value, for their long time retired kitchen furniture. They were so good that they still sell above their original retail prices now.
nine_k 21 hours ago|
I hope that green items are especially prized!
junaru 21 hours ago||
> Every possible product name is carefully checked to avoid undesirable meanings in other languages, political or religious affiliations and fit into our global profile.

Hey Donna [1]...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T2oje4cYxw

close04 21 hours ago||
> Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA, had a hard time remembering numbers and numbers

And also numbers I assume. Does it mean something like “endless stream of numbers”?

I’m very surprised that they have 2000-3000 new products every year. Checking every name against every language of countries they operate in to avoid “bad” names must be a pain.

Snild 21 hours ago||
The Swedish version of the page just says "siffror" (literally "digits", but colloquially "numbers") once.

I'm not aware of any relevant Swedish expression that would repeat the same word like that. Maybe something like "siffror och tal", where both words could be translated as "numbers" by someone not paying attention to the resulting sentence. :)

red75prime 21 hours ago|||
A subdivision of people who know every obscenity in the world would be chuckleworthy, but I guess they use a validation program.
ButlerianJihad 21 hours ago||
Well, that institutional knowledge has been accumulated, held, and passed down through generations of DMV workers in the USA.
devmor 21 hours ago||
And yet some still get through!

I’ve seen “LILCHYT” and “MYSHART” on the road recently.

victorbjorklund 21 hours ago||
Seems like a mistake. No expression like that in Swedish at least.
whalesalad 21 hours ago||
I figured they just let a Dala horse walk around on top of a bunch of keyboards and whatever string comes out is the new name?
zer00eyz 21 hours ago|
I always just thought Swedish had a lot of words for "crap".

Ikea used to make somewhat reasonable and affordable products, that, in total were much higher quality than their price point suggested.

Now they are just cheap, on almost every metric.

lnsru 19 hours ago||
The thing is that recent products are crappy. I got so many decades old secondhand things. They looked like regular old furniture and it was fine. Then I continued buying same things, but new. While the old furniture didn’t change at all the new pieces became yellow/brown after couple tears. We don’t smoke!!! It was a nightmare and I don’t buy IKEA products anymore.
greatgib 16 hours ago||
Sometimes it works and name are weird, nice and fun. But sometimes, quite a lot, I think that it is counter productive because the name is hard to remember, spell or say if local language.

So in the end, hard to say to a seller or type on the part screen the name of what you want. Most of the time you will not be able to remember what was the name of the thing and have to look around and find by categories to find again what you are looking for. And forgot the name already 3 days after. And actually i was multiple time annoyed by that. For example, look at the baby changing table name: ÄLSKVÄRD.

Also, hard to remember/pronounce name make it that often you are lost and confused between multiple names that doesn't make any sense to you like HFEREZR versus HORCRUX.

One case that frustrated me a lot is: good luck finding which white cabinet door you need to buy between VEDDINGE and VALLSTENA that are 99,9% the same, and have the same description on ikea website and shops... In the warehouse you are looking for it, you look for the thing starting with the V, like VA...VII... something, and you find VEDDINGE. Was it this one i needed to be or another name similar?

jltsiren 15 hours ago|
I think your actual issue is that spelling and pronunciation are too inconsistent in your native language. With a more consistent language, it's pretty easy to remember foreign words and names using the pronunciation in your native language, assuming that the letters are mostly the same. You don't need to understand the word or know the correct pronunciation (though both obviously help).
greatgib 4 hours ago||
There are 2 things that are unrelated. When you can't say or pronounce a word, in most language it is hard to remember it.

Also, there is the question of degree of similarity or sound of reading unknown foreign words. If you don't speak ch ok Chinese, a lot of words with different meaning will kind of read or sound the same and it will be very hard to recall and differentiate them.

jltsiren 1 minute ago||
My point was that you can usually pronounce foreign words in your native language, if the alphabet is the same and your language has a straightforward mapping between spelling and pronunciation. And then you can derive the spelling from that fake pronunciation. For example, my native language is Finnish, and that approach works for most words in Germanic, Romance, and Baltic languages. Polish and Czech words are harder, as they often have too many consonants to have a Finnish pronunciation.
slybot 10 hours ago||
> Every possible product name is carefully checked to avoid undesirable meanings in other languages, political or religious affiliations and fit into our global profile

If I remember correctly, they had a desk named "JERKER" in early 2000s.

mikae1 10 hours ago||
That's (sadly) a Swedish name, yes.
villeb2 10 hours ago|||
I think it's a pretty cool name. But it's pronounced more like "Yeah"-rker.
necovek 8 hours ago||
Yeah, large part of the world reads J as Y in ye/yi combinations in English, even if they'd giggle at what it means in English.
ErroneousBosh 8 hours ago|||
I worked with a guy called Jerker at IBM in Greenock, who soon learned to give back as good as he got. Swedish people can be pretty sarcastic, so he was what you'd call a "good cultural fit".
cobbzilla 8 hours ago||
iirc they had a light bulb named TEST. like, I want a real bulb not a test one.
mlvljr 5 hours ago||
[dead]
theginger 8 hours ago||
The GÖÅTSE toilet seat? For some reason their little thumbs up / down icon made me think of this.
yipinwong 18 hours ago||
> Bookshelves → men's names

That's sexist. Saying women don't read books? /s

TheExaltd4 22 hours ago|
Maybe