A striking campaign from Sweden: with Discover the Originals the Scandinavian country hopes that you will look for the place name after which your favorite Ikea furniture is named. ‘Welcome to Bolmen’, for example, is now written on a sign by a Swedish lake. “More than an Ikea toilet brush.”
The names of Ikea furniture do not just come out of the blue. Trash can Toftan, for example, is named after a lake in central Sweden, and the beloved bamboo lamp Misterhult? That is an archipelago with no fewer than two thousand islands. Internationally, these places remain unknown, and the Swedes want to do something about it.
Ikea is now so popular worldwide that a simple search for the locations yields little. For example, if you google ‘Kallax’, there is little chance that you will actually find the area in Lapland. You probably now see a box cabinet in all kinds of colors. Even at Bodviken, a mountain lake that has been declared a UNESCO heritage, you will only find a sink.
More than a toilet brush
Discover the Originals has linked 21 popular Ikea furnitures to the location they are named after to make them as iconic as the products themselves. Nils Perrson of Visit Sweden explains to CNN that the Swedes have nothing against Ikea’s names. “We’re proud of Ikea, and in a way you could say they’ve helped us make Swedish places famous by naming them after them.” But, Perrson added, it’s now time “to show the origins of the product names.”
Villagers near Bolmen, the lake after which a toilet brush is named, are happy with the new campaign: ‘We appreciate that Ikea has named a product after our beautiful lake, but now we want to show the world that Bolmen is so much more than an object that you use to clean your toilet,” council member Magnus Gunnarsson wrote in a statement. The signs will remain standing for a while, so Ikea fans can enjoy themselves travel the entire catalog.
Watch the video below in which Visit Sweden announces the new campaign:
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