There's a Method to IKEA's Madness: The Two Hard Rules Behind Its Product Names

IKEA’s famously baffling product names aren’t random. The company follows a deliberate naming system built on Swedish words, and it holds itself to two non-negotiable rules: a name can never be a registered trademark and can never be someone’s surname. Beyond that, the guidelines are softer preferences — names should be real Swedish words of roughly 4 to 12 letters, ideally featuring the distinctly Scandinavian characters Å, Ä, or Ö, and should simply feel good to say aloud.

The all-Swedish approach only applies to certain categories. For everything that falls outside the standard naming scheme, IKEA switches to plain descriptive names in the local language of whatever market it operates in. Living plants get their Latin botanical names, while the artificial versions are branded SMYCKA and FEJKA.

The piece is a customer-service explainer rather than a technology story, but it’s a tidy look at how a global brand enforces naming consistency at scale — a problem any organization managing a large product catalog or namespace eventually has to solve.