Loading player The Billy bookcase, Ikea’s most famous and best-selling product, has been redesigned with a view to reducing production costs, especially those of materials. The reason is that starting from 2020, with inflation and the crisis in world trade due to the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine, the costs of materials such as wood, glass and paper have greatly increased, in Europe and beyond. leading many companies to decide whether to raise their prices to the public or drastically reduce expenses. For brands like Ikea, which have always focused on the low prices of their products, finding a solution is particularly difficult. In 2022 the Swedish company had increased its prices, although less than it should have done to fully recover the cost increase. It hadn’t gone well: in the first eight months of the year, its net profits had been half those of the same period in 2021, despite an increase in turnover. In order not to raise prices further and risk losing customers, Ikea is now trying to rethink its furniture, trying to keep cost cutting together with its sustainability and circularity resolutions. To reduce material and transport costs, in recent years Ikea has in some cases switched from sturdier types of plastic to lighter and less expensive plastics, and has replaced many pieces that were once made of zinc with aluminum equivalents. recycled, cheaper. Some pieces of furniture have been redesigned to take up less space when packed, and thus reduce the cost of transport: this is the case, for example, of the Nämmaröle garden chair, whose curved wooden slats have been flattened. Another example is the Flintan office chair, which has been slightly made smaller to make it easier to fit the pieces into a flat pack: after the changes, the Flintan stackable in a container went from 2,750 to 6,900. Or the Säbövik bed, which used to come in three packages and now fits in two smaller ones. – Read also: How the names of Ikea furniture are chosen The redesign of the Billy is however the cost-cutting operation from which Ikea expects greater economic results. The Billy is by far the company’s most successful product with around 6.3 million units sold each year (one every 5 seconds, if you want to make an average). The Billy was designed in 1978 by Swedish designer Gillis Lundgren, who said he drew it for the first time on a handkerchief so as not to forget the intuition he had had: the idea was to offer a bookcase with the simplest possible design. The structure of the Billy is made of panels of wood chips and sawdust covered with a thin layer of another material. Until now, the wood-colored Billys were covered with a layer of wood, but now to reduce production costs it will be replaced by a layer of wood-colored paper (like a kind of adhesive wallpaper), which in the company’s idea it should give the same aesthetic result at a much lower cost. For Ikea, the use of paper as a covering is not a new solution, but it has already been used on other furniture since 2004: the head of the operation, Jesper Samuelsson, told the Wall Street Journal that when they started working on this change in 2020 was also because the paper cover had already been tested long enough and with positive results. In Asia, where factories have managed to adapt quickly, the Billys have already been like this since July 2022, while in the rest of the world they will be from January 2024. It is not the first time that Ikea has changed the materials of the Billys to save money: initially the Billys they were made of solid oak or pine wood. Then they moved on to chipboard and in 1999 a further change of materials was made by replacing the lacquered wood coating of the white Billys with a sheet of melamine, a resin that is usually used for kitchen products and which costs less than lacquered wood. In this way the white Billy became decidedly cheaper than the wood colored ones which have become necessary to intervene in recent years. The goal of reducing production costs is even more complicated for Ikea if we consider that in 2021 it announced its intention to become a 100% circular company, that is, to ensure that all its products could be reused, repaired or recycled. However, this objective does not always reconcile with the objective of saving on materials, nor with some widespread beliefs about what is “ecological” and what is not. For example, speaking of the new Billy, Ikea insists that plastic will no longer be used to create continuity between the covering panels along the edges of the piece of furniture, as happened when they were made of wood. On his website he defines the new Billy as “more circular and convenient” and “a stepping stone towards the complete elimination of plastic”. An article published in Fast Company, however, pointed out that to make a paper cover as strong and durable as a wooden one (and more so, according to Ikea) it should generally be “coated with polyurethane, which is a plastic”. Ikea has clarified that it does not use polyurethane for the coating of the new Billy but another plastic, which will still make it overall more sustainable for the environment than the previous wooden model. The same compromise had to be made with some metal nails, which for cost reasons will be replaced with plastic fasteners, therefore more polluting, but which will make it easier to disassemble and reassemble, thus extending its life. – Read also: The accusations against Ikea on deforestation in Romania
