So yesterday we left our hotel in Copenhagen and took the short train journey across the Oresund to Malmo, Sweden. The railway track is suspended underneath the road bridge so we had plenty of views up and down the coastline. On arrival Robert signed his life away at the car rental desk (don’t get me started, I hate car rental companies! Frankly, they need to be better regulated and ‘opened-up’ as the mobile phone industry has been with roaming. Argh…) Anyway, we headed out of Malmo towards the IKEA town of Almhult and the IKEA Museum, the trip took us approx 2 hours driving. Almhult is the birthplace of IKEA, the founder living on a farm nearby and as the business grew, establishing the then growing IKEA in an old timber sawmill. The town has its own huge IKEA, the flagship store, plus a short distance away the IKEA Museum. It was extremely interesting covering everything from the history of the company, the types of materials used and the partnerships established with global furniture manufacturing companies, particularly those in Poland. Ingvar Kamprad, the founder, met with a lot of opposition from Swedish suppliers when he asked them to supply wood or manufacture furniture to his designs. He established links with a Polish furniture maker that was far more keen to work with him, particularly as IKEA moved into flat-packed furniture design. IKEA challenged the norms of furniture design and pricing, something that the Swedish furniture manufacturers of that era didn’t like. They closed ranks and collectively started a fake news campaign to discredit his furniture as being of poor quality. However, one of the leading and influential Swedish magazines of the time decided to compare one of IKEA’s sofas to a similar one produced by an established supplier. The magazine’s report published their conclusion that the IKEA sofa was better produced, used better quality materials and, in their opinion, would last a lot longer than the competition’s sofa that cost twice the price of the IKEA one. Demand for IKEA products surged after the report was published.
In other IKEA news, the meatballs in the restaurant are the same as in the UK and, (see FaceBook – prank – post) we haven’t been selected to appear on the front cover of the next catalogue. There was a photo set up you could have your own cover photo printed! Our photo does look a bit odd, we thought the picture had been taken but suddenly the flash went off.
From there we drove on to our AirBnB base for the next three nights, in the lakeside town of Jonkoping. It took about 1h45 to drive from Almhult. After meeting our host we headed out to the local grocery store to pick up some provisions to make dinner.
It’s now Sunday morning and we’ll see if we can hire some bikes or kayaks.
