Inside Ikea’s dream factory: Its prototyping lab (exclusive)

FastCompany: The tiny easy chair Mikael Axelsson is holding in his hands—a dollhouse-size combination of bent wire, hand-carved foam, and hot glue—has been a white whale for the Ikea designer since he first modeled it back in 2014. The concept was simple, or at least he thought it would be: Build a frame of metal, fill it with a balloon-like cushion, and reinvent novelty 1990s blow-up furniture into a modern home furnishing. But after trying to take the Barbie-size model he’d built and expand it into a full-scale piece of inflatable furniture, he had two major problems.

First, he could never quite figure out how to make an inflatable cushion that didn’t feel like an exercise ball. Second, he couldn’t convince his bosses that inflatable furniture wouldn’t be the total failure it was when the company first tried it in the late 1990s. “It’s been standing on my shelf since then,” he says. A little over two years ago, Axelsson pulled the model off the shelf at his desk in the design department at Ikea of Sweden, the global retailer’s headquarters in the small town of Älmhult, Sweden. Axelsson and the roughly 20 other designers on staff had been called to participate in an experimental design sprint in late 2023.

They had two days to come up with boundary-pushing concepts for the newest edition of Ikea’s PS collection , a recurring furniture-centric product drop of Scandinavian designs that will launch this May. Axelsson saw the chance to revive his inflatable easy chair. This time, in the spirit of throwing everything at the wall, he got the go-ahead to at least explore the idea. He immediately started welding. He ended up building about 20 different versions of the chair, with varying tubular chrome frame configurations and bulbous hand-sealed inflation chambers.

Several of these iterations were on display when I walked into Ikea’s headquarters in early April. I was there to visit Ikea’s secretive prototype lab—the place where conceptual designs get mocked up, refined, refined again, and eventually optimized for the large-scale production that will flatpack and distribute them to Ikea’s estimated 915 million annual in-store customers . Ikea invited me as the first journalist to see the space, the creative heart of the company, which pumps out 1,500 to 2,000 new products every year for markets all over the planet.

To see how the space works, and to understand why it’s so important to Ikea’s $52 billion in retail sales in fiscal 2025 , Fast Company has been given an exclusive look inside the prototype shop. Products being prototyped there are often two to three years away from making it to the shelves of one of Ikea’s 500-plus stores , and some experimental design ideas being tested there may never materialize. “You are basically in the future here,” says Johan Ejdemo, Ikea’s global design manager. The prototype shop is where that future gets gut checked.

From top-level feasibility to aesthetic refinement to the minutiae of assembly fittings and stitch choices, products get built and rebuilt in the prototype shop to continually test whether they’re meeting the Ikea standards for functionality and affordability. [Photo: courtesy of the author] Axelsson’s design went through that exact distillation process, with the added benefit of the concept kicking around in his brain for more than a decade. Settling into the green cushion of a near-final version of the inflatable easy chair that will finally hit stores in May, priced at $199.99, Axelsson cradles that first tiny model he made back in 2014.

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The article highlights Ikea's innovative prototyping lab, which is significant for the brand/design industry, offers some new insights into their approach, and is highly relevant to brand strategy professionals focused on product development.