IKEA Rugs

The cloaks worn on Game of Thrones are actually IKEA rugs that have been cut, roughed up, and have leather straps added.

IKEA Size Fact

IKEA uses 1 percent of the planet’s lumber. That is about 530 million cubic feet of wood used to make IKEA furniture each year.

Ten Interesting Tidbits

The average child asks over four hundred questions each day. Makes it easy to understand why they learn so fast.
Of all the people in history that have reached age 65, half are still living.
The US is older than Germany. Germany became independent in 1871 and the US in 1776.
Two thirds of the people on earth have never seen snow.
A hummingbird weighs less than a US penny.
There are more empty houses in the US than homeless people.
The US FDA allows ten insects and thirty five fly eggs per eight ounces of raisins.
One in ten European babies were conceived on an IKEA bed.
A giraffe's tongue is twenty one inches long.
The Guinness Book of Records holds its own record as the book most stolen from public libraries.

IKEA Naming System

The system was created by dyslexic founder Ingvar Kamprad, who wanted to avoid relying on numbers. Here is the system for naming items:
Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish place names
Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names
Dining tables and chairs: Finnish place names
Bookcase ranges: Occupations
Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers, and bays
Chairs, desks: men's names
Fabrics, curtains: women's names
Garden furniture: Swedish islands
Lighting: terms from music, chemistry, meteorology, measures, weights, seasons, months, days, boats, nautical terms
Children's items: mammals, birds, adjectives
Curtain accessories: mathematical and geometrical terms
There are too many more to mention here, but if you want to learn the rest, you can go to http://lar5.com/ikea/ and peruse the IKEA Dictionary.

Robot Builds Furniture

MIT has built a robot that can assemble IKEA furniture without human intervention. It can assemble flat-pack IKEA furniture all by itself. It has a specialized gripper hand that can grab the pieces and screw them together.

Humans feed the robot a design file that describes the product, such as how many pieces, what do they look like, where the screw holes are, etc. The robots do not need to be instructed how to assemble it. From knowing what the parts look like, the software can decipher how something needs to be put together.

What's in a Name

Sometimes names, sayings, and slogans do not port well to non-English speaking countries. When Kentucky Fried Chicken opened their first restaurant in Beijing, they accidentally translated KFC's famous slogan, “Finger-lickin' good” to “We'll Eat Your Fingers Off!
Pepsi had fun when "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation"  turned out to be "Pepsi will make your ancestors return from the dead". in Taiwan.
Pizza Hut calzone called the P'zone turned into pezón, the Spanish word for "nipple".
Puffs tissues had a problem in Germany as the name is a colloquial term for whorehouse.
A warehouse sign in China was painted on the building as "Translator Server Error".
Coors slogan, “Turn it loose!” came out as, “Suffer from Diarrhea" in Spanish.
Clairol  had a curling iron called the "Mist Stick" that turned out to be “Manure Stick” in Germany.
Jersey Shore cast comes out as "The New Jersey Life of Macaroni Rascals".
Frank Perdue of chicken fame was surprised when, "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken"  was translated into, "It takes a hard man to make a chicken aroused".
The name for a massage parlor in Japan was translated into hand job.
An interesting twist was IKEA furniture in Swedish translated into English became a "Fartfull workbench". Finally after a Papal visit, “I saw the Pope” (el Papa) translated as “I saw the potato” (la papa).

Where did They Get That Name

I sometimes wonder where those crazy names originated, so I went looking.

CVS - When the pharmacy chain was founded in Lowell, MA in 1963, it was known as Consumer Value Stores. Over time the name became abbreviated to CVS.

K-Mart - Sebastian S. Kresge opened his first larger store in Garden City, Michigan, in 1962. The store was named Kresge's, then shortened to K-Mart.

IKEA - The Swedish furniture giant takes its name from found Ingvar Kamprad’s initials joined with a the first initial of the farm where he grew up, Elmtaryd, and the parish he calls home, Agunnaryd.

JBL - The speaker company is named after its founder, James Bullough Lansing. He was born James Martini in 1902, but when he was 25, he changed his name to James Lansing at the suggestion of his then future wife.

BVD - The men’s underwear maker was originally founded by Bradley, Voorhees, and Day to make women’s bustles. Eventually they branched into knitted union suits for men, and their wares became so popular that “BVDs” has become a generic term for any underwear.

Ikea

Each year, Ikea sends out 180 million catalogs. That means there are more of them printed annually than bibles.