Opening doors to new potential
Storyteller : Gillis Lundgren
Country : Sweden
The idea I used for the TORE range - this board-on-frame construction that not only makes products a lot lighter, but a lot cheaper as well - came to me while I was visiting a factory that makes doors in Åstorp, close to Helsingborg in the south of Sweden. What impressed me was that there were so few people working there. There was this factory turning out thousands of doors and the production methods were so super-rational that you hardly needed anyone to oversee them. (Not that I was interested in doors, you understand. I knew we could never sell them at a lower price than these people did, and, by then, having the lowest prices on the market had already become a tenet of the IKEA faith.) No, the thing was, I realised we could use the same technique to produce all sorts of furniture. First you make a wooden frame. Then you put glue on both sides of this frame, stick a sheet of hardboard on one side, fill the empty bit in the middle with something called dufalite, stiff cardboard arranged in a kind of honeycomb pattern, and then cover this up with another sheet of hardboard. Hey presto! You've got an interior door. But you've also got a table top - and the sides of a bookcase. And all sorts of other furnishing components once you start using your head. They still use the very same system today. And, I'm telling you, I don't know of any other system that's more rational, or that can produce good furniture at such sensible prices.
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