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Svalka has been around from at least year 2000. Might even be one of the reasons for the current practice.

I have a "Särna" chair. "Sarna" in Spanish is "Scabies".

Fun fact: Although "Sarna" comes from Latin, seems like it's only used in Romance languages present in the Iberian Peninsula (Galician, Catalan, Portuguese, Spanish...) and not for example in Italian, Romanian or French, as it's an Iberian loan word. Most other languages derive from another different Latin word, "scabiēs".

I swear this is untrue. Half the names of ikea products allude to funny words in German.

Do IKEA have farthinders in their parking lots?

My favorite Ikea product name.

I mean, if you were to use that name for an IKEA product, you can do worse than wine glasses :P

A bed would be a little too on the nose I think.

Want a nice wardrobe? Well vuk u, you get this one:

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/vuku-wardrobe-white-80331973/

Need an end table that is lacking?

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/lack-side-table-white-30449908/

Mine too. It was such a delight seeing it for the first time. Still brings a smile many years later.

They don't just sell furnitures, there is all the small accessories like cutting boards, plates, bowls, towels, cushions... Everything they're selling at their lowest floor before you reach the self-serve warehouse.

And one of them, "Trampa", means "trap" or "cheating" in Spanish

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.

The exception that proves the rule :)

It reminds some system - they didn’t allow “other” category for sorting features, but someone came with “999” :)

Clue to their DB setup?

> BYDGOSZCZ sofa

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

As a Swede, I always enjoy Ikea product names. Many of them are based on their actual function or category. Some are wordplay related to this. For example:

Rinnig - a kitchen towel called "runny"

Skaftet - a series of standing lamps and lamp stands called "the shaft"

Fejka - plastic plants literally called "to fake"

Knöckla - A garbage bin called "crumple up"

Some I don't get but are still funny

Ostbit - wooden serving tongs called "piece of cheese"?

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

I'd love seeing some Polish names in products and learning their pronounciation: but as a fellow Slavic language speaker (which there are hundreds of millions of, compared to 10 or 20 million Swedish speakers), I imagine I can do a pretty good job. So I think Swedish is still globally more playful.

(I'd read it as БИЂОШЧ/БИДГОШЧ, ПРЗЕМИСЛАВ and ПШЧОЛА/ПШЧОЉА — you can check on Google Translate if I am close :))

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?

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

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

I have always thought this about western media. For all of us in non-us countries, the locations, roads and objects are all slightly foreign to us, giving it that other-world feel movies have.

But for those in the US, wouldn't it all be a bit familiar? Whenever I watch a movie set in my home country with home accents and locations, it always feels a bit too familiar and it can cheapen the feel a bit.

Would also be more fitting as most of it is made in Poland.

IKEA Poland missed an opportunity here

> 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.

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.

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).

Exactly the right amount of chaos, particular given that the Brimnes "series" encompasses a pretty wide range of configurations and form factors:

https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/cat/brimnes-series-700496/

We are both calling our callax callax and hate it the equal amount. (The word as well as the piece of furniture)

This is exactly why the names work

Similar conversation I've had with my partner in the past few hours:

Me: it's beside the piano

Her: Which piano?

Me: The Ensoniq upstairs

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...

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

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)!

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.

We’ve had IKEA furniture for over 15 years, sometimes storing it in the attic for a few years after disassembling it, then assembling it again. We’ve also kept the main bodies of our living room furniture while replacing the doors. We sold the old doors on eBay, and other people reused them.

I also inherited some “regular” living room furniture after my mom passed away. It cost about four times as much as IKEA’s higher-end lines. After moving it from my mom’s place to my office, I can already see it falling apart after just three years (total lifetime as my mom only had it for two). The quality is so shite that I honestly wish my mom had bought IKEA.

In the future, I’ll either buy custom pieces from a furniture maker or choose IKEA's higher end lines for longevity and reusability.

I have no experience with newer IKEA furniture, as my old IKEA furniture seems to last forever.

Even the stuff they've traditionally been good at?

Funny thing is, I haven't bought much furniture for ages since my old IKEA stuff has lasted for several decades and is still going strong. Their major kitchen appliances are crap, though.

> You buy something one day, and it starts to deteriorate and become janky after a year, and you'll have a buy a new one

I had a LACK table (9.99 euros at time of acquisition) last for 10 years before a move forced me to give it away. I also have a few random things from them (wooden cutting board, grater, I think a bookshelf) and everything is pretty OK, even the cheap stuff.

The Swedish Academy <https://www.svenskaakademien.se/en> has a word list (SAOL <https://svenska.se/om/om-ordbockerna/#saol>) of around 127,600 current Swedish words, and a Swedish dictionary including historic words from 1521 until today (SAOB <https://www.saob.se/>) of around 500,000 words.

The dictionary was started in 1898 and completed in 2023(!)

That fits, because "knorr" is Swedish for a pig's tail!

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’m going to guess that a good chunk of products are named but never released. I’d love to know what products IKEA develops but decides to not release.

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!

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...

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

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

I'd suggest you look at it as funny and not annoying: IKEA in London, being a very multicultural place, likely has many non-native English speakers as well!

When all else fails, you can always go back to the basic international language of gesturing, pointing and acting out the use of something to get to your point. (Or more boringly, point at the name on your phone)

You could also try adapting pronounciation to what they might expect first, and then if you establish a friendly conversation, offer the real Swedish pronounciation next.

It sounds like that would be very much what use of Swedish names in a global brand should invite, and not annoyance for Swedes :)

This is the mutley crueh story all over again

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

> When Mötley Crüe visited Germany, singer Vince Neil said the band could not figure out why "the crowds were chanting, 'Mutley Cruh! Mutley Cruh!'"

But like those German speakers assumed German orthography, English speakers will assume English orthography when presented with Swedish words.

Only foreign words learned by sound have a chance of getting pronounced correctly, e.g. croissant or Djokovic... maybe even Smörgåsbord?

If there were a British furniture shop operating globally and using placenames for products, British people would have trouble asking the locals for HAWICK (hoik), LOUGHBOROUGH (luffburra), FROME (froom) or YNYSYBWL (anissabul)

> As a Swede in London

At least you’re definitely right.

Try speaking or writing English English to US English natives.

I was surprised at a Jysk in Spain where I used the dialect pronunciation of a Norwegian city (saying Læknes for Leknes) when buying chairs with that name, and the girl not only understood me but used close to the same pronunciation when asking someone to get them from storage

Do you find ABBA's English pronunciation/phrasing annoying?

> For Swedes it must be weird to be able to find a product named after yourself and your place!

Plenty of people named Billy in the English speaking world, too.

A lot of them are Scandi place names, too.

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...

I'm firmly in camp dad joke, but since Ü is a German letter that is not part of the Swedish alphabet, may I suggest you learn how to say RÄKSMÖRGÅS and update the joke?

The patched version might even work on some Swedish-speakers if you nail the pronounciation! :)

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).

My first memory of being angry with not knowing English was when we were trying to read the pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh cards and I clearly remember it being gibberish. Otherwise it's difficult to remember what it was like to not know a skill before you learned it, at least it is for me.

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.

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.

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).

That's (sadly) a Swedish name, yes.

iirc they had a light bulb named TEST. like, I want a real bulb not a test one.