IKEA

RETROFIT 2009 | WELS/AUSTRIA

The creativity of IKEA, the multinational furniture group, has been driven by logistical challenges since its earliest days. It was in 1956 that Ingvar Kamprad, who founded the firm in Sweden’s sparsely populated southeastern region of Småland, began dispatching items of furniture by post – and invented the famous flat pack for that purpose. Today IKEA is the furniture market’s leading brand operating 267 furniture stores in 39 countries serviced from 43 central warehouses, employing 123,000 people, offering 9,500 products bought in from 1,220 suppliers, and occupying a total of 4 million m3 of storage space – making it one of the world’s largest warehouse users.