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Furniture giant IKEA is planning to sell spare parts for its furniture – its aim is to prolong the life of its products and dispel the idea that it makes disposable goods
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- Title
- Ikea to start selling spare parts for products
- Published
- Jan 25 2021
This is just a guess, but I feel like the perception that their products are disposable trash may be rooted in people doing a poor job of putting the furniture together. I have lots of Ikea stuff that's survived several moves and is still in good condition. If you properly assemble it and tighten all the fasteners the first time, it's pretty solid stuff.
I think the perception that Ikea's products are disposable trash comes from the fact that their cheapest, bottom-end products are disposable trash.
Sure, laminated cardboard honeycomb can get you a serviceable table for $25 (which to be honest is a notable technical accomplishment: it's essentially recycled cardboard boxes into an actually usable piece of furniture); but it is in every sense of the word "cheap". It won't hold up to any amount of abuse, moving with it is a dicey proposition, liquid spills rapidly destroy both the finish and "structure", and for god's sake don't sit on it.
Their better stuff is unquestionably good (though very quickly stops being cheap); in my experience, the particleboard-based furniture is solid but starts to disintegrate around fasteners with repeated dis- and re-assembly, and anything solid wood holds up very well. However, you can get decent or good furniture almost anywhere; Ikea is one of the very, very few places selling new bottom-dollar furniture, and so that furniture is what ends up setting their reputation.
Furniture makers like Floyd have tried to solve the assembly/disassembly problem that other commenters have mentioned plagues Ikea furniture. I think they've done a great job. Most of the improvements are in fasteners and I would call them "non-destructive," in the sense that one isn't screwing into particle board, but rather into a threaded metal tube basically this. Ikea gets my praise, though, because they may use weird, custom parts, but Floyd didn't mention in the assembly manual what size bolts were used in a $2,000 couch. So, when we were missing crucial hardware, it was a pain to go figure out the necessary size at the hardware store. Even an $80 office chair I bought came with a few spares and listed the size of the fasteners in the manual.
What's interesting, though, is that the price is really high for Floyd furniture. The design is good enough, sure, but when I can buy refurbished solid wood furniture locally for the same price, it's hard to see the value in the Floyd stuff. I'd rather the hassle of moving high-quality furniture that's heavy than spend the same money on high-quality flat pack furniture.
3 years ago we bought an Ikea sofa set (couch, loveseat, chair) with replaceable covers and legs. We got two sets of covers so we can wash them and have variety. Ikea still sells these couches and we can get extra legs or covers if we need it. I'm sure the sofa set will outlive our fondness for it.
The linked article describes how Ikea has been working for years. Maybe they will apply this to more of their furniture, which is great.
Ikea has been doing some shady stuff with their wood sourcement, but offering spare parts is a good thing I think. That being said, I have never considered them to make disposable goods, they are overpriced for what they are, but they last a long time.
I think that they are well-priced in that they make relatively lightweight, durable modern furniture — which many people value highly these days.
I’m currently in the process of moving continents from Europe, and I’m incredibly thankful that my furniture is easy to take apart and light to move and that I’m not messing around with super heavy, solid wood furniture.
In my experience, IKEA furniture is mostly permanent if you never disassemble it. If you've got to disassemble it and put it back together (like say, a bed frame when moving), after about 3 times quality degrades rapidly. I've still got IKEA stuff from my first apartment, a bit over a decade ago. There was a stretch were I was moving annually. None of the bedframes survived.
The low-mid range IKEA will not last 100's of the years the way older, high-quality furniture does. Some of the higher-end stuff that's not made of particleboard might. Problem is that high-quality furniture that will last those 100's of years is very heavy and expensive, which means it's very annoying in the modern era of job instability and low wages.
Yeah. Especially true if you live in a humid climate. Fiber board just soaks up the moisture, which causes it to expand enough to where any parts held together with dowels will get damaged when you take it apart. The fit won't be as secure when you put it together again so you're gonna have yourself a wobbly piece of furniture.
The same kind of goes for screws. Moisture just softens the wood up after a while so it won't stand up to much wear and tear. I think this is basically true of ALL fiberboard furniture though. Where Ikea is useful is actually the QC. You can order stuff that looks about the same off Wayfair or Amazon, but when you look at the reviews probably 20% of them arrive damaged.
IKEA QC isn't perfect either. I ordered some glass doors from IKEA, a local delivery, couldn't fit them in my car. They arrived damaged 3 times. And not just a little damaged. There were tears in the box, obviously bent in half at least once, crushed under other stuff. And was marked fragile so many times and in large enough font you could see it from 20 feet away.
Shipping damage is a different problem. When I read some of these Amazon reviews the reviews are usually complaining about manufacturing and packing problems like "They drilled the holes into the opposite end of the board" or "One of the parts is the wrong size."
Ah, misread the "arrived damaged" bit.