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/

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.

> BYDGOSZCZ sofa

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

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

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.

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

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?

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.

A lot of them are Scandi place names, too.

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

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

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

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

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...

I hope that green items are especially prized!

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.

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. :)

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

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).

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).

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).

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.

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.

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.

Yës

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

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...

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

A møøse once bit my sister...

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.

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.

> preferably contain the letters Å, Ä or Ö

I'm 100% för this.

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

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.

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.

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".

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.

> 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.

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/

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.

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

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.

Every startup is named like these though so it is sorta biased.

E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs

> The Swedish alphabet goes …XYZÅÄÖ.

IKEA sold that too: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/306072403869

Pöyzen Böyzen

> knock-off of ikea

We have one called jysk... They're doing alright.

Yeah, given they sell to every continent, I find it utterly impossible they truly tested this with each of the dozens to hundreds of languages their customers speak.

The entire section of the website about 'The Dark Ages' is priceless. They don't pull any punches: https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-story/the-dark-ages/

This is fckn brilliant!!

I’m bookmarking it for sharing

Just brilliant!

Why not rename to IKEÅ ?

You mean öf cårse?

Brilliant.

Submit it to Hacker News as its own post before I do.

Seriously.

You have one hour.

How am I supposed to know what matters if they don't tell me, in an honest fashion?

Huh, interesting that they are collated at the end. These differences also makes sorting language dependent.

In Hungarian it's A, Á, B, C, Cs, D, Dz, Dzs, E, É, F... So Cu--- comes before Cs---

I raise you an em-dash —̈ with an umlaut!

Suck on that, AI Slop Detector!

(Confession and question for dang: I actually used an LLM to generate that unicode composite to copy and paste —̈ is that against HN guidelines?)

For future person who also thinks...wait...IKEA has a hotel...?? Indeed:

https://www.ikeahotell.com/en/about-us/

https://www.fastcompany.com/91529069/what-its-like-to-stay-i...

British lad giving a review/tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trcUc9ILYqI

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_branding (especially the Foreign Orthography section)

Häagen-Dazs is American, but was apparently meant to sound Danish. To a Scandinavian it absolutely doesn't.

Hahaha for sure

The thing is that recent products are crappy. I got so many decades old secondhand things. They looked like regular old furniture and it was fine. Then I continued buying same things, but new. While the old furniture didn’t change at all the new pieces became yellow/brown after couple tears. We don’t smoke!!! It was a nightmare and I don’t buy IKEA products anymore.

Could also be Vietnamese, they are big on diacritics.

Scandinavia and the Nordics are quite fancy and refined for Americans. Lagom, hygge, fika, the minimalism, the enlightened equality and solidarity, good education, little crime, highest happiness ratings, even prisons are like hotels, etc makes it a kind of imagined lifestyle that's cozy and thoughtful and so on.

Well, that institutional knowledge has been accumulated, held, and passed down through generations of DMV workers in the USA.

Well, I'm an American, but US media is disproportionately set in Los Angeles or NYC, and I haven't been to either of those places.

I was watching Monk recently, and it feels kinda neat seeing a show shot in San Francisco because I used to live there. I wouldn't say it feels "cheap" though.

> Brzęczyszczykiewicz

MAUL HALTEN!

The German vowels are a good start, but Swedish pronunciation is of course a little bit vowel shifted from German.

Funnily enough, there are quite a few IKEA products with Finnish names. (Most are place names from northern Sweden, where there's a significant Finnish minority.)

Now I want a HÉTFŐ desk, and a SZÉKESFEHÉRVÁR... something.

"Hey, Dana…”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T2oje4cYxw

There is a lamp called Fartyg

> Need an end table that is lacking?

End table? That’s a server rack: https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/List_of_IkeaRacks

Ok porridge drawer is definitely someone having a laff

I didn’t even know the name for the longest time. It’s only when I wanted to buy some extensions that I realized the cult status of that model, and that’s not (just) because of the name. It’s a truly great design and a shame that it was discontinued many years ago.

You also have the Mitsubishi Pajero. Feel free to find the derogatory term in the wiki.

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

I'm happy to say I'm in the circle of jer...Um...So do I, one of the best home purchases I've ever made!

Article is missing the urban legend about "Bite the wax tadpole"

At least BYDGOSZCZ is a real word in a real language

My missus is Hungarian, I'm sure it's a lovely language but it just sounds like Klingon to me.

Which makes it hilarious when she's annoyed at the boy.

You really wanna get weird, there's those continents of Asia, Africa, and South America, full of different sounds to use for names. Ikea is Swedish, so they get to propagate Swedish culture to the rest of the world.

Nitpicking but your examples all have a clear etymology that may even help you deduce the purpose of a thing. Hamburger means 'from Hamburg' and can be short for 'in the style of Hamburg', which sounds perfectly normal to a native. This is, would I say, less strange than if it was named 'Hamburg', which seems to be the case of IKEA furniture. Photoshop, in the same way, seems to refer to a photo workshop, which once again has an etymology, as it refers to the initial purpose of that program, reworking pictures. On the opposite, if things are just named 'for the lulz', and my desk is called Boston, my text editor 'golden retriever' and my lamp acorn, confusion may at some point arise.

Pax is another one that violates the rule that someone pointed out lower. Also Malm is a surname which is another violation of the rule (one of the characters in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was named, if I recall correctly, Stefan Malm). I remember reading the books with my then-wife and she said it was like reading an IKEA catalog. I thought she was referring to the character/place names, but it turned out that the second book had a long section where the titular girl furnishes an apartment from IKEA and—that chapter was exactly like reading an IKEA catalog.

the real caveat: those descriptions are genuinely load bearing

Håhåhåhå

Even worse, in Czech it’s

A B C Č D Ď E F G H Ch I J…

• „če“ goes after both „ca“ and „ci“, but „ác“ goes between „ab“ and „ad“

• „cha“ goes after „da“ and „ha“

Because it would then be pronounced IKE-Oh.

Also, the A is short for Agunnaryd, the founder's hometown. (IK is his initials, Ingvar Kamprad, and E is for Elmtaryd, his family farm.)

Just to make things worse, the Scandinavian languages use different versions of what have historically been the same letters, and collate them differently. E.g. Norwegian has æ (Ä), ø (Ö), å, collated in that order. Technically the Swedish variants are not part of the Norwegian alphabet, but they're typically collated with their modern Norwegian equivalents.

At least in Norwegian, ae, oe, and aa is also traditionally collated as if they were using these letters, so a word starting "aa" comes at the end of the alphabet, after z, oe and ae....

If the names are not load bearing, are they even names anymore?

Place looks pretty nice, too.

How about eating a Sandwich with Turkey, Bologna and Cheddar, maybe with a Paris-Brest for dessert?

Although "Malm" is a common surname, it's a word first and a name second if that makes sense

The same way "Brown" is common surname in English but mostly makes you think of the color first

When it comes to names like "MALM", it's likely incidental.

"Malm" is a a noun with several meanings, most notably "metal ore", but also some (more archaic) meanings like "area with sandy soil" or "city outskirts".

The fact that "Malm" also happens to be a surname is secondary; Swedish has a lot of surnames that are simply ordinary nouns or adjectives. A completely literal "No surnames, ever" rule would probably be quite a bit too restrictive. I suspect that the actual internal rule is "No names that are primarily (or solely) surnames", or something to that effect.

The fact that Sz in Hungarian reads as s and other way around, S becomes sh - is mind-boggling especially for Poles, where Sz is pronounced as sh. and S remains s.

GNOME used to give software applications names of common nouns that were usually not strongly related to their function: Nautilus, Palimpsest, Totem, Tomboy, Seahorse. At some point I think they decided to move away from this because they found many users had a hard time remembering the names.

Malm was released in the 1980s: https://techvibeblog.com/what-is-ikea-malm-made-of/

Girl with the dragon tattoo was released in 2005

With a side of tasty meatballs.

Vietnamese can easily be recognized because most words are one syllable and the vowel may even have two diacritics stacked on top.

That's how they getcha, and then go full midsommar...

And yet some still get through!

I’ve seen “LILCHYT” and “MYSHART” on the road recently.

Which has resulted in this catastrophe:

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71OSnDl45vL.jpg

The A can still stand for Agunnaryd and the circle at the top can be the midnight sun, which embodies the sprit of Sweden

It’s not load bearing, it’s a way of life.

The names just hit different.

Thanks to French, who came up with the current writing system.

Is that rule number one or two in that naming things are hard?

In Spanish "z" always sounds [s] (except in Spain where it sounds [θ]), but "s" can often sound [z].

Currently 6833 people in Sweden have the last name "Malm", and some large fraction of them were born before 2005 (could not be bothered to check how many, sorry!).

I've had tasty meatballs. It was the lingonberry sauce that I was introduced from Ikea.

I believe you, but that site reeks of LLM generated SEO junk

A Portuguese Jesuit, actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Pina

You’ve let your biases affect your analysis