I've been assembling a lot of things over the past few weeks, and that got me wondering.

IKEA did not invent the Allen key. Though today, it might feel that way. Canadian Peter L. Robertson first commercialized the square socket in 1908. And in 1909, American Willian G. Allen patented the hex varietal.

Due to an increased interest in interchangeability, hex nuts and keys would go on to become the dominant mode of fastening after World World II. And in English-speaking countries, the name Allen has largely stuck.

They're cheap to make and you get built-in leverage with its longer arm.

IKEA first began using hex keys in the 1960s. Their philosophy was: "You do your part. We do our part. Together we save money." Meaning, you assemble the things yourself. Here's a set of assembly instructions from 1968:

Today, most of us probably take it for granted just how radical of an idea this was. IKEA had smartly figured out that flat packing furniture saved a ton of money for everyone. The challenge was that it then had to get everyone accustomed to putting together their own furniture.

But they more than did that. They arguably ushered in a revolution in furniture. And they did it on the backbone of a simple, yet revolutionary, device that, over a century later, most of us still call an Allen key.

IKEA opened its first permanent showroom in 1953. And by 1965, it had opened a 500,000 sf flagship store on the outskirts of Stockholm.

Supposedly, the inspiration for this new store was Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York. Inspired by its continuous looping design, IKEA wanted to create a real-life version of its well-known catalog. This led to the current maze-like design where you wander through staged living spaces and get excited to buy lots of things.

However, as IKEA began to open in more urban locations it actually started doing away with this prototypical design. The thinking, which seems perfectly reasonable, was that mazes weren't appropriate for smaller and more urban locations. These customers would want to pop in, quickly get what they need, and then leave.

But it turns out they were wrong. Their customers are telling them the opposite: they still want mazes. In other words, they want a curated experience that helps them figure out what to buy. According to IKEA: "People buy more when they are shown more." Sounds right. And so IKEA is now working to make its urban stores more, you know, maze-like.

The company has already done this in cities like Vienna and Paris, and apparently it consistently leads to higher sales. It's a good reminder that (1) humans are still humans regardless of where they live and (2) if you want people to visit and linger in your physical store, it's good practice to curate experiences.

P.S. I love IKEA.

Last year, IKEA went around the world interviewing some 37,000 people in 37 countries about what it takes to "make us feel at home." And one of the things that they discovered was that nearly 50% of people do not feel like their home reality is authentically represented by what they see in the media. In other words, there is a disconnect between how we actually live at home and how the media suggests we are or ought to be living.

To explore this disconnect a little further, IKEA has just announced that photographer Annie Leibovitz will be the company's inaugural Artist in Residence. Leibovitz is best known for her celebrity photographs. But for this assignment, she's going to be travelling to the US, the UK, Japan, Germany, Italy, India, and Sweden, to photograph normal people doing normal things in their homes.

This is a fascinating idea because we know that there are all kinds of cultural biases around housing. Here in North America, for example, there is a longstanding history of hating apartments. If you wanted to properly raise a family, you needed a morally correct form of housing; meaning, a grade-related house. But this reality isn't universally possible in most big cities today, and that is probably one of the reasons why we now have this disconnect:

...why do people feel like they're not represented in the media, that they’re left out? ‘In the same way that there has been a typical idea in the fashion industry about what size a woman should be, there's been a typical idea of what a home is,’ wagers Leibovitz. ‘But now we've opened up in all sorts of ways, and there’s a difference between a home and feeling at home. And the latter can happen in many different places and maybe that's more important now than an actual home.’

On a more basic level, I think people are also just endlessly curious about how people live and what their homes are like. So regardless, this should be interesting.

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash