> BYDGOSZCZ sofa

This may not even be that far off from reality, looking at the sort of names rando brands on Amazon often have...

If the goal is something that reads weird for most Europeans, then try picking names from Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, or Welsh.

It is kind of funny sometimes. Sometimes it’s related to what the thing is (like a pun) and sometimes just random

Just go to Polish IKEA and buy the Grzegorz table and Brzęczyszczykiewicz chairs …

its not all that strange tbh - im learning danish which is adjacent enough to swedish that I can understand most of the names - sometimes they aren't relevant to the product function, sometimes they are, but they're just names. Is it strange to you that the word "photoshop" uses english language? what about a Hamburger being named after a place?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Electron

Ikea mobile application has little speaker near the product name that invokes pronunciation - sadly, that's not available on desktop site. I still tend to read Swedish accented letters in these names as German umlauts.

So that wouldn't be a problem if Polish names would be provided with audio examples.

By the way, the communistic period here was full of products using regular words, name of places or people’s names. We had Wisła, Bieszczady wall units. First Polish color TV was Jowisz (Jupiter); first TV ever my mother had was called Szafir (Saphire). Then Szarotka (elderweis) or Sylwia radios from 50s and 60s respectively. A clone of IBM PC with Intel 8086 (or with Russian clone) from 1986 was called Mazovia - Mazowsze which is a historical region of Poland, same name was also used for DOS encoding for that machine.

> CROYDON sofa

I mean.. we have the Windsor Chair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_chair) and the Welsh Dresser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_dresser) and those both slightly predate ikea so it's not a new thing.

You have a point but in Branding, it is accepted that bold (noisy) and distinctive (rather than only descriptive) names are an advantage: Creating billion-dollar brands: Vercel, Azure, Windsurf, Sonos, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adyIaTopO6g&t=610 (Jun 2025).

When [3] contains half as many as [2] it should be a good sign to take pause to consider both could be faaaar from exhaustive. [1] is just a link to a page of links, it doesn't really say anything about how many total named products there are. Meanwhile, https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/ranjithpanicker/ikea-global-... claims "34,932 unique global products" and Ikea Canada alone claims ~12k products https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/newsroom/corporate-news/ikea-cana...

Why should we treat a minor wiki page and some dude's personal site (who disagree with each other on totals) as authoritative proof Ikea is wrong about it's own catalog? Especially when it's not hard to find 1st/3rd party sources claiming an order of magnitude more products. Keep in mind, some things will also fall off the catalog over time.

I was at IKEA once when they first came to America and there was a chair that was called the "assengråbben" or something like that.

I heard a guy nearby telling the person with him "must be for the interns".

Perhaps even the source of that rule.

You know the saying... a "Do not step on the grass" sign only shows up after people start frequently stepping on the grass...

Yes, they also sold a toilet brush named "VIREN". In Germany this is the plural of virus. And some year ago Danes complained IKEA named carpets and runner after danish towns but never something "better".

An excellent desk, by the way. I still have mine (the old heavy duty model)!

Chevy "no va" https://www.thoughtco.com/chevy-nova-that-wouldnt-go-3078090

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.

The toilet seat is named after the strait between Denmark and Sweden. https://youtu.be/ajBN0Xypi0I

The door mats should be named after doors, and the place mats named after places.

Is also a Swedish word, though slang, the imperative form of paxa which basically means the same as "dibs!" If I know my english colloquialisms correctly.

But how can I find the answer to the question without reading punchy headers followed by paragraphs like

> How We Leverage Naming

> Our Naming Strategy, Explained

> Why Swedish Is Important

> The Bottom Line

And unforgettable aphorisms like

> It isn't just a name—it is the output of a scalable, globally coordinated, linguistically validated, Swedish-inspired naming framework designed to optimize brand consistency

to let me know? I'm completely lost on this page and can't find the answer without these.

May I introduce you to the UK chain Iceland and their stance on management consultants?

https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-story/the-dark-ages/beware-m...

It does not answer at all. 2000-3000 names per year?

I agree, and it's kind of sad that getting simple, clear communication is exceptional.

A lot of them are Scandi place names, too.

And then, unbeknownst to what the Sci-Fi future might bring, an Italian home appliance manufacturer names themselves SMEG.

You may say that "There's too much confusion", ha!

I was there three days ago, can comfirm. And if you want to stay overnight, you _of course_ sleep in the neighbouring IKEA Hotel! And if you check-in to the hotel first, you‘ll get a voucher for free entrance to the museum. Did I mention that an absolutely excellent breakfast is included in the very reasonable room rate? And in case you visit the museum in the near future, they currently have a special (temporary) exhibition about IKEA's founder, Ingvar Kamprad, who was a very creative but also exceptionally socially and environmentally responsible entrepreneur. Nice contrast to today's appalling tech billionaires.

Swedish does naturally use a lot of letters with umlauts (e.g. a common plural suffix -är), so a noun with a special letter is usually not hard to come by, and looks more Swedish (than, say, Dutch or English, which are sort of cousin languages).

Those are the letters we have that are distinct from English. Not exotic to us, but yeah, "weird letters" is probably considered part of the international brand now.

By the way, we consider them unique letters, not A and O with diacritics. The Swedish alphabet goes …XYZÅÄÖ.

Oh, and I just learned that we only officially added W in 2006. Before that, it was considered a variant of V. We still pronounce them the same, which is why many swedes will mix them up when speaking English. Mostly in the W->V direction, but I've heard the opposite happen too.

Not sure why, but when I see certain diacritics with latin alphabet, my brain tries to place the language somewhere in Europe. I don't know if I can call that an exotic feeling but it certainly feels foreign.

I guess it helps with emphasizing their Swedish identity, which is one of their goals with naming. Doesn't gel too well with "feels good to say" for a non-native speaker, but I see their point.

Most likely. In the early 90s there was a knock-off of Ikea called Stør which used the ø for exoticism. I had assumed that it was a Danish company, but apparently, not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STØR (The store where I bought some of my first furniture from—off the 60 in City of Industry—was quite possibly the original location).

> I don’t know Swedish. Is it because these diacritics make the names seem more exotic?

of course. Haagen Dazs, Motorhead, etc have known it loooong ago

Yës

röck döts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_umlaut

A møøse once bit my sister...

This article from 2018 claims the same (and that Danish sounding names are rugs and floormats): https://www.worldnomads.com/in-the-news/the-hidden-message-i...

> preferably contain the letters Å, Ä or Ö

I'm 100% för this.

I hope that green items are especially prized!

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. :)

A subdivision of people who know every obscenity in the world would be chuckleworthy, but I guess they use a validation program.

Seems like a mistake. No expression like that in Swedish at least.

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.