Want proof? Google the word IKEA: 108 million hits.
Design ideas, add-on upscale furniture feet and drawer pulls, cool customizations known as hacks, shopping tips, parodies, a fan site, a movie about a filmmaker who lived in an IKEA store and even a TV show — in its fourth season — wryly called Easy to Assemble.
Try searching an American furniture company on Google: Not so much, maybe a few million hits.
And: No parodies, no films, and no fan clubs for the American furniture companies.
Google is not the only measure of IKEA's might: The Dutch company with Swedish roots is the world's largest furniture manufacturer.
IKEA has more than 100,000 employees in more than 44 countries and revenues of more than $27 billion euros. The company projects its earning will increase by as much as 85 percent by 2020 and its store count will go from around 300 to around 500 during the same time frame.
Thank Riverton, N.J., resident Sharla Floyd and other consumers for the brand's growth.
A consultant to non-profits who works from home, she likes the "functional, practical furniture" which blends well with other styles, allowing her to "re-purpose" other decorating finds and furnishings.
She said the arrival of children, now ages 3 and 1, plus a recent move from a tiny bungalow to a rambling fixer-upper four times larger, spurred her to look to IKEA for furnishings.
"They were the genesis," she said of the kids.
Floyd lays out all of the wooden furniture pieces and organizes the hardware, carefully studying the assembly diagram several times — IKEA famously avoids words in its instructions since it ships to so many countries.
She's never had an issue with assembly, but encountering some issues during assembly seems a fairly common issue. There's a helpline as a last resort, or you can pay IKEA or someone else to assemble the furniture for you.
While she often has something in mind when she visits th! e South Philly store, she does like to roam and take in the "visual" room presentations in the showroom. She seldom looks at the catalog or online before going.
"I want to hunt it down in the store," Floyd said.
Mike Zambotti is furnishing his second-floor Voorhees, N.J., apartment, mostly from scratch. He turned to IKEA because the price was good — $119 for a bed frame and headboard — and it was easy to transport and get up stairs.
Sharla Floyd and her daughter Anna, 1, sit on an IKEA couch, Oct. 20, 2013 in Riverton, N.J. Children spurred Floyd to consider less expensive, durable goods from the furniture maker.(Photo: Gannett/Jodi Samsel, (Cherry Hill, N.J.) Courier-Post)
Unlike Target, another company that sells flat-pack furniture, IKEA displays all of its furniture assembled, allowing shoppers to picture how a room might look, said Zambotti.
As well as the Tyrsil bed — IKEA names all of its furniture lines — he bought a mattress which came rolled up to fit in his car, a lamp and pillows.
Assembly was a bit of a challenge for Zambotti, a bank employee in Cherry Hill, N.J.
The headboard went on backwards the first time. The pre-drilled holes in the support slats did not seem to align right, so the bed was put together without screws meant to hold the slats in place. All told, assembly took about an hour and 45 minutes.
"Assembling IKEA furniture together is a great litmus test on a relationship," he said of the chore he completed with his girlfriend.
"If you can do three pieces of furniture of varying skill levels, you can make it as a couple," said Zambotti, sounding as though he meant it.
Caren Fitzpatrick, a Somers Point, N.J., resident, called the IKEA furniture she bought to! furnish ! a son's room 27 years ago "junk" and "terrible." Fitzpatrick also hated that all the sizes were originally in metric. She avoided the brand for years as a result.
But a few years ago, she began buying IKEA for storage — closets, shelves, cubes — and now she's a convert.
"It went together well and helped us fill our house quickly," said Fitzpatrick, who likes how the IKEA integrates with her mid-century modern pieces.
Kristie Barnett, a Nashville-based designer who blogs as "The Decorologist," has built a business helping clients integrate IKEA into their homes, especially the storage items.
Her clients tend to be under 40 and many like to add paint or custom hardware to dress up the IKEA pieces, she said.
There's such a demand for IKEA in her area that an upstart business feeds the demand. Modern Nash goes to an official IKEA store in Atlanta — four hours away — once a week and brings the flat-pack furniture back and then assembles it in client's homes for a fee.
"There's nothing at their price point for value and quality," said Barnett.
What does IKEA stand for?
IKEA is an acronym. I is for Ingvar and K is for Kamprad, the first and last name of the founder of IKEA stores. E is for Elmtaryd, the name of the farm in Sweden where Ingvar Kamprad grew up. A is for Agunnaryd, the name of the village near Kamprad's boyhood home.
While the company has Swedish roots going back to 1943, it actually is operated from the Netherlands. Flat-pack design began in the mid-1950s. The first American store was opened in 1985 in suburban Philadelphia.
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