IKEA CEO Anders Dahlvig on international growth and IKEA's unique corporate culture and brand identity

Abstract

Executive Overview IKEA started in 1943 as a one-man mail order company in a small farming village in the southern part of Sweden called Småland. The founder, Ingvar Kamprad. only a 17- year-old boy at the time, initially arranged for the local county milk van to transport the goods to the nearby train station. Today the IKEA Group has 70,000 co-workers and a turnover of over 11 billion euros (close to $11 billion). The IKEA concept started in the 1950s with catalogue marketing combined with a showroom where customers could see and touch IKEA products. The company's three distinct features were function, quality, and low price. Problems with suppliers led the company to start purchasing from foreign producers in Eastern Europe. During the 1960s the concept was taken even further by introducing the warehouse principle. A huge store in Stockholm was opened where customers picked the products from the shelves themselves. IKEA turned a capacity problem into a new way of delivering products to customers, which is now a cornerstone in the IKEA way of doing business. The first attempt to go abroad was made in 1963 in nearby Norway, outside Oslo. IKEA took the lead in using nontraditional materials for furniture, like plastics, that made IKEA design well-known worldwide. The company also targeted younger families. It moved to the U.S. in the mid-1980s and has been targeting Eastern and Central Europe since the 1990s. Today IKEA has over 150 stores in more than 20 countries. CEO Anders Dahlvig started his career at IKEA in 1984, after an undergraduate degree in business administration at Lund University in Sweden and a master's degree in economics from the University of California. He has held various positions in Sweden and abroad including Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, and the UK. He started off as a controller and advanced to store manager, country manager, deputy retail manager for Europe and, since 1999, CEO of the IKEA Group.