IKEA Redesigns its Iconic Billy Bookcase

IKEA’s Anti-Inflation Kit

With supply-chain bottlenecks and inflation at an all time high, the Swedish retailer is on the quest for a change. Ikea’s solution to these emerging issues? Redesigning its products with the intent of keeping its prices low while maintaining its profit margin.

It is a widely known fact that one Billy bookcase is produced every three seconds and sold every five. According to an insight given by the retailer, it is now using “paper foil” – essentially contact paper with patterns imitating wood – instead of wood veneer on the Billy bookcase. Another significant change is the use of aluminum in place of zinc in its bathroom hooks, and plastic, which has replaced the wood in its cabinet doors and drawers.

The way Ikea is constructing furniture is changing too – with reinforcements being made to the Rönninge dining table, which now uses veneer legs instead of solid wooden ones. This, in turn, spares the company the costs of handling an unpredictable lumber supply and market.

As we know, not all change is necessarily good change. This is evident in Ikea’s case.

Abiding by the concept of quality over quantity, as Ikea lightens and cuts corners on its furniture, any expectations of high endurance (which were already low to begin with) seem to plummet as well.

Shifting to aluminum, known to be a softer metal than zinc, might result in a decrease in the durability of products. Ikea’s changes are to land in the U.S. market in 2024, which means Billy buyers will essentially be sold sawdust, glue, and paper. The fact that it costs under $100 may well be the Swedish retailer’s only saving grace.

“Get the prices down and you increase sales — we created that demand, not the consumer,” stated a former Ikea environmental director in 2020. This leaves the market open to more cheap products.

After all, everyone knows the quintessential Ikea shopping experience involves filling your cart with a hoard of comparatively cheap items you don’t need but “might come handy some day”. Not surprisingly, an increase in the sale of cheap items eventually leads to the need to replace things often — an endless loop of purchasing furniture that, in hindsight, could end up robbing the customer of a lot more money in the long run.

Worse still, all this builds up to an exacerbated waste problem.  In other words, with a decrease in the quality of products, there is an increase in waste material. Every year, Americans abandon 12 million tons of furniture in landfills — much of it dumped by companies like Ikea.

Furthermore, this cycle is destructive to the environment that produces the raw materials required to make the furniture in the first place. On that note, it would not be wrong to assume that Ikea’s new paper-covered Billy bookcases will start their lives off the assembly lines, only to pile up in our landfill graveyards.