In 2024, Ikea sold €45.1 billion worth of goods, making it the largest furniture and home furnishings company in the world—with an estimated one-tenth share of a fragmented global market—and among the largest companies in Europe.1 The company’s production volume is so high that, in the early 2010s, it was estimated to use about 1% each of the world’s entire annual production of commercial wood and cotton.2 Ikea’s products have made it a global cultural phenomenon due to several idiosyncrasies. The company offers minimalist, functional products influenced by Scandinavian design and assembled at home by the customer, packaged in a way intended to be easy for a customer to carry and transport themselves too. This simplified “do-it-yourself” product philosophy has allowed Ikea to scale up manufacturing of some of its most popular items into the hundreds of millions of units, resulting in unprecedentedly low prices.