We live in an era where mass produced commodities and standardization of nearly everything creates useful economies around a product leading to lower cost, availability of parts, and held resale value. However, this can lead to sterilization of design. And, as the article points out, people will gravitate towards uniqueness in many markets.
By taking this constraint of not re-building the product but instead extending it we can begin to imagine the explosion of design that has happened software extend elsewhere. And, I hope, a world where these platforms can be recycled, upcycled, and repaired more readily because unlike software there is an environmental cost to short-lived products.
Reform benefits from the engineering and structure of Ikea's products, and offer a customizing service for those who want their standard Ikea kitchen to look a little more individual.
In a way, this is no different from car customization shops. The basic structure is sound, well-engineered and unchanged, but the cosmetics are personal. And it's much cheaper than buying a fully custom-made car.
This such a hilarious example of HN "HNing" an article title.
Instead of the original title, which literally describes what is happening, we have jargon being shoe horned in for no reason at all.
"Putting a Designer’s Polish on Ikea Products": Oh, some designers are buying Ikea products and doing cool, new shit with them.
"Designers Using Ikea Products as Platform": Don't what the fuck this means. Is Ikea launching some sort of partnership program? Are designers creating their products and selling them through the Ikea brand?
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The article contents effectively describe the former. There is a quote from the article that sums it up pretty well for those with little patience:
“We would tell the client, ‘You can save half if you use Ikea carcasses, and we just skin it.’ That’s where the initial idea started.”
Or put another way: The bits you can see are high quality ~designer~ finishing, the bits you can't see are standard off-the-shelf IKEA parts.
Like a clean Wordpress theme using only a conservative number of plugins (Advanced Custom Fields to take care of most things). It's quite a viable business model.
Somebody had two broken slats in a bed, and it's natural for them to look at "hacking it" by using some slats from another product of the same brand. All fine. But in the end the solution in the thread is a bit different: buy some pieces of wood and just saw them.
The vendor of course probably would like them to throw away the whole product and buy a new one. Those slats look very thin. I've never experienced broken slats in a bed, so I'd be suspicious of the quality but who knows, maybe they were sturdy and the user did something wrong.
This is the equivalent of those posts that commented on the Dropbox announcement with "why don't people just setup an NFS/Samba drive"?
Using a saw is not rocket science, but it's not plug-n-play either. Manual saws are a pain and electric ones are dangerous and still require training. Getting a saw and a drill is itself not free. And if you live in an apartment, you might not have any good place for using it.
I still think a much larger percentage of the general population, probably even HN readers can saw and drill than run a custom server or setup Samba. The complexity is low and the "discoverability" or what you call it is high, as you can see what you're doing and can try many times.
Of course once you get to more complex stuff, making joints, finishing surfaces, it's another thing...
“So far, the founders have had little contact with Ikea, except for a letter from the company’s lawyers.
“It was the nicest letter ever from their lawyers, saying, ‘It’s fine, you can do whatever, just remember that we have a registered trademark,’ ” Mr. Christensen said. (There is now a disclaimer buried deep in Reform’s website indicating that the company is not affiliated with Ikea).“
I visited an IKEA store for the first time 2 days ago. It was fascinating experience. Before, I only knew of IKEA abstractly from the jokes & memes about their furniture being impossible to assemble.
Actually walking through the place was extremely interesting. Observations...
- it was the busiest furniture store I've ever been in for a non-holiday shopping day. I've never seen a Rooms-to-Go that busy.
- the walkways are deliberately zig-zagged in serpentine fashion around the showroom. I likened it to museum exhibits (especially traveling exhibits) or Disney venues that move people through a space in sequential fashion. For people already familiar with showroom, they can go through the shortcut doors in the middle of room. Even little things like the arrows on the ground were unique; instead of being painted on or vinyl adhesive, the arrows are actually lit from cans above your head.
- the Ikea restaurant was actually full. Costco would be another rare example of the food court being full. Most restaurants in retail stores are usually empty and a mind-boggling waste of floor space. E.g. the restaurants inside Fry's Electronics and Macy's department store are always empty; you also knew Borders bookstore was dying when you saw nobody sitting in the store's coffee shop.
- the housewares seem to be a good value. E.g. The 1-quart hermetic jars at ContainerStore were $6.99 but the equivalent at Ikea was $2.99.[1][2] I chuckled when I noticed that even the jars were do-it-yourself: you had to install the rubber ring on the lid! I think lots of customers would be willing to do that to save $4.00.
I bought most of my furniture many years ago from Ethan Allen but I walked away from Ikea totally impressed their retail concept and presentation. They hit the sweet spot combination of aesthetics + DIY + price.
As for the article, I noticed that many hobbies (e.g. sewing and crafting) have converged on Ikea as the common-denominator for organization. The analogy of Ikea carcasses as a "platform" makes perfect sense. E.g. there's a company that makes storage displays to subdivide the Ikea cubes.[3] Ikea is the closest thing in the furniture industry to have "standardized pieces" for others to build on.
Ikea is not the only place to buy DIY ready-to-assembly furniture. Home Depot, Lowes, and Office Depot have particle board cubes as well. The difference is that IKEA is very standardized with long-running product lines (more than a decade). You can build out in incremental steps as the budget allows. You can buy one cube or drawer cabinet from Ikea and 5 years later, you add another cube that matches. Home Depot and Lowes will have "flavor-of-the-month" storage products from different vendors depending on whatever contracts were favorable at the time.
> the walkways are deliberately zig-zagged in serpentine fashion around the showroom.
Yes, they try to make people go through everything to increase the chance of them buying something on an impulse, I guess.
> the housewares seem to be a good value. E.g. The 1-quart hermetic jars at ContainerStore were $6.99 but the equivalent at Ikea was $2.99.[1][2] I chuckled when I noticed that even the jars were do-it-yourself: you had to install the rubber ring on the lid! I think lots of customers would be willing to do that to save $4.00.
You mean the little rectangular glass things with plastic lids? In my experience the hinges on the lids tend to come off if the lid is even a little bit off-center when closing. And the porcelain things (plates, mugs, ...) have quite poor "glassing" (or whatever the term is), they won't last very long. Go to the Ikea restaurant and take a look at the plates there for an example..
Now I'm not saying everything they do is crap. Some of the things are pretty good, and the ones which aren't are at least very cheap.
Anecdata, there was a market show in Milan years ago (maybe there still is) called Eurocucina (Eurokitchen), and a friend of mine in the business /designer furniture salesman) referred to it as Euroantina (Eurocabinetdoor, it doesn't sound good translated, but it rhymes in Italian) as he - knowing the actual manufacturers/brands knew that the base cabinet was always the same (additionally often physically made in the same factory) and the difference (year vs. year and brand vs. brand) were just the "custom" cabinet doors and tops.
I think it is really sad that affordable furniture has gone down in quality so much. Now I walk into most homes and its full of pressed woodchips in furniture form. When I visit my grandparents old house (who are not rich) I see custom made solid wood pieces with carvings all over everywhere. This is unaffordable for me nowadays. What happened?
17 comments
[ 224 ms ] story [ 1523 ms ] threadBy taking this constraint of not re-building the product but instead extending it we can begin to imagine the explosion of design that has happened software extend elsewhere. And, I hope, a world where these platforms can be recycled, upcycled, and repaired more readily because unlike software there is an environmental cost to short-lived products.
In a way, this is no different from car customization shops. The basic structure is sound, well-engineered and unchanged, but the cosmetics are personal. And it's much cheaper than buying a fully custom-made car.
Instead of the original title, which literally describes what is happening, we have jargon being shoe horned in for no reason at all.
"Putting a Designer’s Polish on Ikea Products": Oh, some designers are buying Ikea products and doing cool, new shit with them.
"Designers Using Ikea Products as Platform": Don't what the fuck this means. Is Ikea launching some sort of partnership program? Are designers creating their products and selling them through the Ikea brand?
===
The article contents effectively describe the former. There is a quote from the article that sums it up pretty well for those with little patience:
“We would tell the client, ‘You can save half if you use Ikea carcasses, and we just skin it.’ That’s where the initial idea started.”
Or put another way: The bits you can see are high quality ~designer~ finishing, the bits you can't see are standard off-the-shelf IKEA parts.
Look at this: http://www.ikeahackers.net/2017/09/hackers-help-luroy-slats-...
Somebody had two broken slats in a bed, and it's natural for them to look at "hacking it" by using some slats from another product of the same brand. All fine. But in the end the solution in the thread is a bit different: buy some pieces of wood and just saw them.
The vendor of course probably would like them to throw away the whole product and buy a new one. Those slats look very thin. I've never experienced broken slats in a bed, so I'd be suspicious of the quality but who knows, maybe they were sturdy and the user did something wrong.
Using a saw is not rocket science, but it's not plug-n-play either. Manual saws are a pain and electric ones are dangerous and still require training. Getting a saw and a drill is itself not free. And if you live in an apartment, you might not have any good place for using it.
I believe that's referencing this (in)famous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
I still think a much larger percentage of the general population, probably even HN readers can saw and drill than run a custom server or setup Samba. The complexity is low and the "discoverability" or what you call it is high, as you can see what you're doing and can try many times.
Of course once you get to more complex stuff, making joints, finishing surfaces, it's another thing...
“So far, the founders have had little contact with Ikea, except for a letter from the company’s lawyers.
“It was the nicest letter ever from their lawyers, saying, ‘It’s fine, you can do whatever, just remember that we have a registered trademark,’ ” Mr. Christensen said. (There is now a disclaimer buried deep in Reform’s website indicating that the company is not affiliated with Ikea).“
Actually walking through the place was extremely interesting. Observations...
- it was the busiest furniture store I've ever been in for a non-holiday shopping day. I've never seen a Rooms-to-Go that busy.
- the walkways are deliberately zig-zagged in serpentine fashion around the showroom. I likened it to museum exhibits (especially traveling exhibits) or Disney venues that move people through a space in sequential fashion. For people already familiar with showroom, they can go through the shortcut doors in the middle of room. Even little things like the arrows on the ground were unique; instead of being painted on or vinyl adhesive, the arrows are actually lit from cans above your head.
- the Ikea restaurant was actually full. Costco would be another rare example of the food court being full. Most restaurants in retail stores are usually empty and a mind-boggling waste of floor space. E.g. the restaurants inside Fry's Electronics and Macy's department store are always empty; you also knew Borders bookstore was dying when you saw nobody sitting in the store's coffee shop.
- the housewares seem to be a good value. E.g. The 1-quart hermetic jars at ContainerStore were $6.99 but the equivalent at Ikea was $2.99.[1][2] I chuckled when I noticed that even the jars were do-it-yourself: you had to install the rubber ring on the lid! I think lots of customers would be willing to do that to save $4.00.
I bought most of my furniture many years ago from Ethan Allen but I walked away from Ikea totally impressed their retail concept and presentation. They hit the sweet spot combination of aesthetics + DIY + price.
As for the article, I noticed that many hobbies (e.g. sewing and crafting) have converged on Ikea as the common-denominator for organization. The analogy of Ikea carcasses as a "platform" makes perfect sense. E.g. there's a company that makes storage displays to subdivide the Ikea cubes.[3] Ikea is the closest thing in the furniture industry to have "standardized pieces" for others to build on.
Ikea is not the only place to buy DIY ready-to-assembly furniture. Home Depot, Lowes, and Office Depot have particle board cubes as well. The difference is that IKEA is very standardized with long-running product lines (more than a decade). You can build out in incremental steps as the budget allows. You can buy one cube or drawer cabinet from Ikea and 5 years later, you add another cube that matches. Home Depot and Lowes will have "flavor-of-the-month" storage products from different vendors depending on whatever contracts were favorable at the time.
[1] https://www.containerstore.com/s/kilner-round-hermetic-glass...
[2] http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/90227985/
[3] https://www.stampnstorage.com/storage-for-ikea/?sort=pricede...
Yes, they try to make people go through everything to increase the chance of them buying something on an impulse, I guess.
> the housewares seem to be a good value. E.g. The 1-quart hermetic jars at ContainerStore were $6.99 but the equivalent at Ikea was $2.99.[1][2] I chuckled when I noticed that even the jars were do-it-yourself: you had to install the rubber ring on the lid! I think lots of customers would be willing to do that to save $4.00.
You mean the little rectangular glass things with plastic lids? In my experience the hinges on the lids tend to come off if the lid is even a little bit off-center when closing. And the porcelain things (plates, mugs, ...) have quite poor "glassing" (or whatever the term is), they won't last very long. Go to the Ikea restaurant and take a look at the plates there for an example..
Now I'm not saying everything they do is crap. Some of the things are pretty good, and the ones which aren't are at least very cheap.
Or at least http://www.ikeahackers.net/ :-)