Ikea CEO Jesper Brodin on AI, ditching the catalogue, and making 'disposable' furniture sustainable
Brodin and I caught up recently to discuss all of this and more.TIME: We like to say everybody has a TIME story. I think everybody has an Ikea story. The brand intersects with so many life events—people’s first apartments, a first child, a desk when a kid gets to high school, furniture when a kid goes to college.
We were victim to the supply chain disruption for a while, only to realize that this is a new reality. We have to retain our agility. We also learned along the way that we were probably a bit too rigid in the way we were set up.It’s really the trend topic right now. Maybe we should ask generative AI the same question and see if it answers differently than what I’m going to do now.
The most beautiful execution of that is when we use wood and click fittings, where basically you don’t have any glue or any metals. And the more you sit on the chair, it will make the compound stronger. To be honest, in the old days, if you would move some of our furniture, move with it four or five times, the compound itself will start to get a little bit loose and in the end, deteriorate. So it’s a great opportunity to prolong the life length for furniture.
Today, we are trained to assume that things like sustainability that are good would actually add to the cost. In Ikea, from the start, we were taught that wasting resources was a sin. So if you look at our tradition and history, long before anybody could spell sustainability, it was about reducing air in the packages, filling up the containers, making a flatpack.Depop Made Sustainable Shopping Cool for Gen Z.
I would also [note] that Ikea is normally a big market share in secondhand. Our furniture tends to rotate. If you go to any eBay in the world, you would probably see Ikea on the top of the list of items [that] have been circulated.It serves as the best example of circularity for us. Most people sleep on a mattress. On average, they last for about 10 years. In the Netherlands, which is a country of 17 million people, what means is that you have 1.7 million mattresses per year that go to waste.
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