Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
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This IKEA trivia quiz has 50 free questions with answers and walks the long natural way through the company: what the four letters stand for, the teenage founder who started by reselling matches, the first store in Älmhult, the leaf-shaped table whose sawn-off legs invented flat-pack, the Billy bookcase and the Poäng, the rules behind the strange product names, the restaurant and its meatballs, the catalogue that once out-printed the Bible, the blue Frakta bag Balenciaga copied, and the psychology paper that named the IKEA effect. There are questions on the store network, the largest store, the ownership structure and Kamprad's frugality and controversies too. It starts easy (what colour is the building?) and ends with questions only people who have read the founder's biography will get. It works as a round for a design-minded quiz night, an office icebreaker, or a solo test between trips for tea lights. Every answer has been checked against a reference source, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The blue and yellow of every IKEA store are the national colours of which country?
Sweden
The company was founded there in 1943 and opened its first store in the province of Småland in 1958.
Q 02The letters I and K in IKEA stand for the founder's name. What do the E and A stand for?
The farm and village where he grew up
Elmtaryd was the family farm and Agunnaryd the nearby village.
Q 03How old was Ingvar Kamprad when he founded IKEA in 1943?
17
It began as a mail-order business selling pens, wallets and picture frames; furniture only arrived five years later.
Q 04What did the young Ingvar Kamprad buy in bulk from Stockholm and resell to his neighbours?
Matches
He moved on to seeds, pens and Christmas decorations before founding a company at 17.
Q 05In which small Swedish town did the first IKEA store open in 1958?
Älmhult
The IKEA Museum now occupies that original building.
Q 06IKEA's first flat-pack product, the leaf-shaped Lövet table of 1956, was born when a designer did what?
Sawed off its legs to fit it in his car
Gillis Lundgren was moving it for a catalogue shoot; the table was reissued in 2013 as the Lövbacken.
Q 07According to IKEA, the main reason customers assemble the furniture themselves is to avoid what?
Shipping air
Flat boxes cut freight and packaging costs, which is what lets the prices stay low.
Q 08Which was the first country outside its homeland to get an IKEA store, in 1963?
Norway
Denmark followed in 1969, Switzerland became the first outside Scandinavia in 1973, and West Germany came a year later.
Q 09In what year did IKEA open its first store in the United States?
1985
The US and Germany now each have around 55 stores, more than any other countries.
Q 10IKEA entered Japan in 1974, withdrew in 1986, and returned in which year?
2006
The first attempt struggled with Japanese customers who expected assembled furniture and smaller sizes.
Q 11The world's largest IKEA store, opened in 2021, is in which city?
Pasay, Philippines
At 65,000 square metres it took the title from the Kungens Kurva store outside Stockholm.
Q 12In which city did IKEA open its first Indian store, in August 2018?
Hyderabad
The company had spent years there sourcing textiles before it was allowed to sell directly.
Q 13In March 2022 IKEA announced it was closing all 17 of its stores in which country?
Russia
It had entered the market in 2000 and its stores had been among the busiest in the world.
Q 21The Poäng armchair was designed in the 1970s by Noboru Nakamura, a designer from which country?
Japan
It launched in 1976 as the Poem and was renamed and given a wooden frame in 1992 so it could be flat-packed.
Q 22What was the Poäng chair originally called when it launched in 1976?
Poem
By 2016 IKEA was selling about 1.5 million a year and had made 30 million in total.
Q 23The Klippan sofa, launched in 1980, is named after what?
A municipality in southern Sweden
It was designed to fit through a standard doorway and has sold with interchangeable covers ever since.
Q 14Since which year has IKEA been the world's largest furniture retailer?
2008
It now runs more than 500 stores in around 60 countries with revenue north of €44 billion.
Q 15What does IKEA call the one-way route that steers customers counter-clockwise through a store?
The long natural way
Shortcuts exist, but the design is meant to walk you past everything before you reach the checkouts.
Q 16IKEA sofas and coffee tables are named after places in which country?
Sweden
Beds get Norwegian place names, textiles Danish ones, lamps are seas and lakes, and outdoor furniture is islands.
Q 17IKEA lamps take their names from what?
Seas and lakes
The naming system exists partly because the founder was dyslexic and found words easier to remember than product codes.
Q 18Why did Ingvar Kamprad prefer real words to product codes for naming furniture?
He was dyslexic
The result is a catalogue full of Swedish place names, lakes and islands.
Q 19The Billy bookcase was named after whom?
An IKEA advertising manager
Billy Liljedahl wanted "a proper bookcase just for books", and Gillis Lundgren sketched it on a napkin in 1979.
Q 20In 2020, roughly how often was a Billy bookcase being sold somewhere in the world?
Every five seconds
More than 140 million had been sold by 2023, and Bloomberg once ran a "Billy index" to compare prices across countries.
Q 24What is the children's play area in every IKEA store called?
Småland
The name means "small lands" and is also the Swedish province where IKEA was founded.
Q 25The first IKEA store's café became a full restaurant in which year?
1960
Food is now about 5 percent of IKEA's sales, and menus adapt locally: shawarma in the Middle East, poutine in Canada.
Q 26IKEA's plant-based meatballs are made from pea protein, oats, potatoes and which fruit?
Apples
The vegetable version launched in 2015 after a year of testing; the classic pork-and-beef köttbullar remain the bestseller.
Q 27Roughly what share of IKEA's total sales comes from food?
About 5%
The company operates restaurants in 38 countries plus the Swedish Food Market by the checkouts.
Q 28The IKEA catalogue was first published in which year?
1951
The first edition was 68 pages in Swedish with a print run of 285,000.
Q 29At its 2016 peak, roughly how many copies of the IKEA catalogue were printed?
200 million
That was 69 versions in 32 languages, and more copies than the Bible that year.
Q 30After how many years in print did IKEA stop publishing its catalogue in 2020?
70
By 2004 the catalogue had been eating 70 percent of the marketing budget; the shift to digital finally ended it.