To a body language expert, how you sit can say a lot about you: whether you're happy or sad, lost in love or bored out of your brain, whether you're listening or lying or maybe just loafing. The dynamic between sitter and settee is especially telling, and now, in a new twist from a global product development perspective, researchers at IKEA reckon they can even tell your nationality from your posture. And on the basis of their observations, the global furniture manufacturer is launching a new sofa and armchair inspired by what they claim are particularly British sitting habits. It's a world first for the company, and an eye opener for the rest of us, too.
According to Mikael Berryman, IKEA UK & Ireland's interior design expert, until now all of the Swedish manufacturer's furniture has been designed with the Scandinavian consumer in mind. But in recent years a number of factors have come to the designers' attention from lab reports and extensive product development research, all of which point to fundamental differences in the way that Swedes and Brits sit. The nuances are numerous but, in short, according to Berryman, it can be summed up as this: "Swedish people sit on their furniture. English people sit in it."
What he means is that in Britain we inhabit our chairs on a much deeper level than our Scandinavian cousins. And quite literally: we burrow into the corners until we're all but swallowed up in cushions. "If I were to sit like that in Stockholm I'd get some very funny looks," says Berryman. "It would be considered very rude."
It might not be such a flattering picture to paint of the Brits, but we can take some comfort (if we don't have enough already from our current perch) from IKEA's research showing that there's at least one nation that's even ruder than us. According to deputy test lab manager Anders Jarlsson, "In Sweden we think we sit normally. In Germany people sit 'hard'. In England people sit 'soft'. And in America, we joke that people sit on the floor..." By which he means that people in the States are so very relaxed in their sitting habits that they are as good as lying down, and therefore don't need much structure from a sofa at all.
For all that IKEA takes its product development research incredibly seriously, going beyond focus groups to make actual home visits, observing how people use their furniture and talking to them about their lifestyles, this is the first time the company has developed a product specifically with a British consumer in mind. It is of paramount importance, however, that every product in the IKEA range is an international one — so Tidafors, named after a Swedish village, will still be available worldwide with its high back, deep seat, cosy corners and memory foam seat cushions. There was no thought of calling it Warrington or Tonbridge or Hull and the official line and the marketing blurb will have nothing to do with Brits or Britishness either. It's an experiment, and IKEA will be watching with great interest how well it sells in different countries.
Knowing its customers is traditionally very important for IKEA. Since its earliest days, when legendary founder Ingvar Kamprad was selling boxes of matches to his father's friends, and furniture to newly weds and newly moved families, understanding why people buy has been its fundamental first rule of sales. A close second, as Kamprad's own life has proved to him time and time again, is the importance of trying ideas out before dismissing them.
Today the company's HQ and the heart of its multinational operations is still in the Swedish town of Älmhult, deep in the area known as Small Land, where Kamprad grew up and where the thrifty and resourceful way of life is most often credited for teaching him much of his business savvy. Now it is IKEA land — the business premises form a sizeable village to which around 4,000 IKEA co-workers commute daily. And while the superstore which opened here in 1958 may not be the biggest (in fact there are complaints amongst staff that it is too small, and plans
to expand), it still provides what must be the ultimate trip to IKEA, flanked as it is by the IKEA hotel and restaurant, the IKEA museum (featuring IKEA room sets through the ages), numerous IKEA office buildings, the design studios, and the marketing department where they shoot the famous catalogues. Just down the IKEA street is a vast recreation centre featuring an IKEA pub for workers (which I am» convinced serves the cheapest beer in the whole of Scandinavia), a multifunctional IKEA sports stadium, a crèche, steamrooms and a gym. Far from being overrun by Swedes, the campus is stridently diverse in its workforce, with some 42 different languages spoken.
One of the more fascinating parts of the campus is the testing lab, where around 7,000 safety and durability tests are performed on IKEA products every year and research into sitting habits is fine tuned. It's a veritable gymnasium of robotic wooden bottoms, pumping up and down and wiggling around on sofas, chairs and sofabeds fresh from prototyping and production. The facility is overseen by Jarlsson, who is also constantly on the look out for new weaknesses to test for. He explains how it's not just the seats that get pummeled either: "Customers will also always be sitting on the arm and the back of a sofa - we have to always be on the watch for how people use the products."
Although it's less relevant to Tidafors, which is not a flatpack product, next to the physical testing facility is the department where IKEA assesses the effectiveness of those legendary self-assembly instructions. True to Kamprad's philosophy that simple ways are the best, passers by from the local town are drafted in and given a variety of furniture to assemble. How they fare is taken into account and the instructions amended and developed accordingly. IKEA is happy with this system, and it works well. However, given that just five minutes before entering this facility I was told that roughly 50 per cent of people who live in Älmhult work for IKEA, you have to wonder whether this means of testing isn't a little biased.
Jarlsson, like all the IKEA employees I meet at Älmhult, is astonishingly loyal to the company, where he has worked — in one capacity or another — for 40 years. It's not all that unusual — it's common to find three generations working here at the same time. The feeling is that there's a higher incentive at play than the 15 per cent staff discount they're entitled to on IKEA goods.
When asked, Jarlsson and his co-workers most frequently cite the degree of freedom they are given to perform their roles as a major factor for the low staff turnover. There is also a very clear admiration for Kamprad who, while now in his 70s, is still very much a grounding presence in the business. Pervading the whole campus is a humble sense of pride in the way the operation is organised. "It is how it is," says Mattias Lindquist, who's in charge of information at Älmhult and has himself been there for eight years. "There is something uncomplicated about everything we do. We strive for simplicity."
The new sofa, Tidafors, was designed by Ola Wihlborg, alongside product developer Jens Bengtsson. "We work hard to understand our customers' needs on a global perspective,» down to the smallest detail," says Bengtsson. "We ran a lot of research and we found that we had a hole in the range." People, he explains, will typically only buy three or four sofas in their lifetime. The premise behind Tidafors is that what people need from their second and third sofa is different from what they are looking for in their first. Like a car, a sofa is an important purchase, and people graduate in their tastes and requirements. If your first sofa was a Vauxhall Astra, Tidafors is — if not exactly a Mercedes E-Class - the closest IKEA currently gets to a luxury sedan.
"There is a focus on a higher back, heavy fabrics, more comfort," says Bengtsson, who also asserts that the living room is the most important place in most people's houses and apartments: "Your sofa defines you to your friends." There are also, he says, three stages that people tend to go through when they are making an important purchase such as a sofa: "First they see it, then they need to touch it, and finally they have to try it out. Of course, the products we make must fulfill expectations at every stage."
Wihlborg is a freelance designer based in Malmo. In the furniture and product design industry — both in Sweden and around the world — designing for IKEA is a big deal and a huge accolade, not only for the fact that it gets your products in front of a huge audience, but also because it's known to be a challenging role, thanks to the tight constraints that the manufacturer places on every product to ensure it's suitable for the global marketplace. In Tidafors' case, the brief was especially tight. It had to be a sofa that would be easy to take home and easy to fit through the door, explains Wihlborg. And while upholstered sofas are nigh on impossible to make flatpack, there are still a host of criteria for transport and packaging. What customers may not realise is that most IKEA sofas are stackable, for example.
A main criterion, of course, is that IKEA is able to make its product offering as cost effective as possible. "Sometimes we set the price before we develop the product," says Bengtsson proudly of the £399 three-seater. "In this case, we got it down even lower. We work to decrease the price the whole time we are developing it, while also keeping the quality high."
Tidafors is a "new type of sofa for IKEA" he explains, and with it, the company hopes to find new customers. But Bengtsson and Wihlborg also hope it will appeal to its existing customers and those closer to home. As Kamprad himself is quoted as saying, "No method is more effective than a good example." So if Tidafors sells, we can likely expect much more innovation around British sitting habits to come. It won't be the end of the story in any case, for at IKEA, says Kamprad (and this applies whether you're sitting on or in your sofa or whether, indeed, you're over it entirely), "Most things still remain to be done."
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