Oh! The feeling of achievement you get after successfully putting a piece of IKEA furniture together, only to realize it was not very successful either way. You spend hours putting together a table clumsily, only to notice you lost a bunch of screws along the way, or better yet, you are done setting up a dingy rack, and there is still some screws lying around, and you have no idea what to do with those. And the famous instruction manuals that IKEA furniture comes with? Yes, the ones with no instructions at all, just a bunch of pictures that sometimes make no sense at all.
IKEA is planning to make your lives easier by ditching those painful screws with wedge dowels. These are wooden ribbed protrusions that fit into the holes drilled into the accompanying component. And nope, these fittings will not wear out no matter how many times you assemble and disassemble the parts.
The company will not only be making the lives of its customers easier, but they will also be reducing significant costs by getting rid of the metal fittings. With the new method, instead of screwing your furniture together, you can click it together. The amount of time and frustration this will save you is immeasurable.
Jesper Brodin, the range manager for the company, said, “IKEA furniture typically contains quite a lot of fittings. We see some challenges in the time and interest in doing that. So we thought, what happens if we try to take them out totally? We are now into the implementation phase of making it possible for you to click your furniture together.”
Click! Click! Click! And done. How much faster? “I actually put together a table which used to take me 24 minutes to assemble but took me three minutes to click together,” says Brodin.
The idea of replacing screws with wedge dowels was first introduced for Stockholm cabinets back in 2014. This year at the Design Indaba conference, IKEA announced the innovation for its entire range.
We are excited about the next clickable IKEA furniture, are you too?
