Trying to pronounce product names at IKEA is no doubt part of what makes visits to the massive furniture store so much fun, but if you’ve ever wondered where they get such weird titles, the business has now prepared a video explaining precisely that.
The latest short, titled Why it is named that?, was released as part of IKEA’s expanding digital museum and gives IKEA fans an insight into the origins of why each piece of furniture in the store has a unique name and what goes into the process of coming up with them.
According to the video, a tiny team of employees is in charge of naming anything between 2,000 and 3,000 products per year, and all names must pass through a checklist to fulfill IKEA’s requirements. For starters, they must be between four and twelve letters long, with a bonus if they include the Swedish letters “å,” ‘ä” and “ö,” according to Christina Berg-Overgard, the company’s product management leader. They can’t also be a trademarked term or a family name, and they have to be a “nice word.”
To learn more about the company and its heritage, you can head over to the company’s digital museum.
