Eketorp…Not Just An Ikea Sofa Anymore….

While Ikea product names make me giggle, they are actual words in Swedish, Danish, Finish or Norwegian. Most Ikea furniture, coffee tables, bookshelves and media storage units are named after places in Sweden. Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of Ikea, was dyslexic and found that naming products with proper names/words made it easier for him to remember them.

Here is an example, the Eketorp sofa:

“Eketorp is an Iron Age fort in southeastern Öland, Sweden, which was extensively reconstructed and enlarged in the Middle Ages. The Eketorp fortification is often referred to as Eketorp Castle. Throughout the ages the fortification has served a variety of somewhat differing uses: from defensive ringfort, to medieval safe haven and thence a cavalry garrison. In the 20th century it was further reconstructed to become a heavily visited tourist site and a location for re-enactment of medieval battles. Eketorp is the only one of the 19 known prehistoric fortifications on Öland that has been completely excavated, yielding a total of over 24,000 individual artifacts. The entirety of southern Öland has been designated as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.”

Look It Up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eketorp, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikea

I love Ikea and UNESCO ….I will be blogging about both of them in the future…

Kimdianna “Klippan” Jones

(yes, that is my Ikea name….I’ll let you figure out what it means….)