IKEA- Furniture Retailer to the World Case Study

IKEA- Furniture Retailer to the World - Case Study Example It has a customer base of 583 million in 2007. Its customer base consists of mainly the middle class who are able to afford the furniture. It has had some significant changes in terms of their market and customer base. It dealt in various products when starting but changed to furniture which was very expensive in Sweden at the time. There was also a significant change in terms of their designs and manufacturing. These changes came about due to the pressure from their competitors. Their competitors were losing market to them due to their low prices and quality products (Dahlvig, 35). Ingvar Kamprad is the founder and head of the company. Like many other companies, IKEA started small by selling products from the family farm. The name IKEA came from an acronym where I and K were his initials; E stood for Elmtaryd which was the name given to the family farm and A was for Agunnaryd which was the Southern Sweden village where the farm was located. Their first employee was Gillis Lundgren, a 22 year old designer. The management at IKEA was informal and its founder led by example the low cost tradition. With Kamprad at the top, his management was non-hierarchical and informal. It was more of team based and his team would not spend extravagantly (Stenebo, 40). The management team comprised of young people who had not been employed by other enterprises before. This was because the more educated and elite could not adapt well with the work at IKEA. The business grew from a single store in Sweden to 285 stores in 35 countries. There were different challenges experienced in starting up these stores but they were overcome by the good team at IKEA. The employee base also grew from the founder who was joined by the designer and later the different managers at the different branches and other employees. The employee base stood at 127,800 in 2008 with a product range of 9500 products (Dahalvig, 45). As at 2008, IKEA had 1,380 suppliers in 54 countries. This