For the maker looking to turn their project into a business, trying to price your widget can be a bit of a conundrum. You want to share your widget with the world without going broke in the process. What if you could achieve both, letting the end user finish assembly? [PDF]
While over a decade has passed since Harvard Business School released this study on what they dub “The IKEA Effect,” we suspect that most of it will still be relevant given the slow pace of human behavior change. In short, when you make someone become part of the process of manufacturing or assembling their stuff, it makes them value it more highly than if it was already all put together in the box.
Interestingly, the researchers found “that consumers believe that their self-made products rival those of experts,” and that this is true regardless of whether these people consider themselves to be DIY enthusiasts or not. This only holds if the person is successful though, so it’s critical to have good instructions. If you have a mass market item in the works, you probably don’t want to require someone with no experience to solder something, but as IKEA has shown, nearly anybody can handle some hex screws and Allen wrenches.
If you’re looking for more advice on how to get your invention in people’s hands, how about this Supercon talk by Carrie Sundra about manufacturing on a shoestring budget or this video from Simone Giertz on her experiences with manufacturing from idea to finished product. You might want to steer clear of people promising patents for pennies on commercials, though.
This same phenomenon is why Betty Crocker cake mix require cracking in an egg. Originally the mix contained powdered egg protein and didn’t require adding an actual raw egg, but focus groups found people believed the outcome to be better and felt like they actually made the cake, if they had to crack an egg.
Can confirm! Just assembled a second monitor on a movable arm yesterday. Assembled the arm myself, instructions were clear enough.
Now I don’t have to alt-tab again and again just to switch between schematics and layout.
The person in the image is wondering where all their money went, after opening an empty box, right?
Wondering what the ikea support might have told them to make them smile after that??
It illustrates the critical part often forgotten by makers that want to sell their widgets: even if documentation and assembly instructions are perfect, kits must be backed up by great customer support.
Also, don’t fall into the trap implied by the first paragraph: selling your widget as kit instead of finished product may cost you more when accounting for all the time spent on documentation, kitting, and support.
The idea of empowering someone by making it easy for them to “make” something by assembling prepared parts is not new.
A century ago, boxed cake mixes came on the scene, allowing someone with little practice or experience to make “home made” cakes.
But the real genius came about post-war, when manufacturers omitted the dried egg, and asked the homemaker to provide that ingredient themselves. That changed it from “add water, mix, bake” to “mix ingredients that you assembled, blend with some skill, and bake. It made the baker more invested in the process and made “better tasting” cake.
That subtle change of one ingredient changed the game: the cake-maker was proud of the product, shared it with friends, and sales took off.
I was going to mention this myself. There is some irony in the fact that the powdered egg going into the mix at the factory was probably better calibrated to the mix and may have more predictably made the cake than an egg pulled from the fridge. But the perception matters a lot in this case.
Trowing in some extra eggs usually makes cakes taste better. And so do spices, cocoa, raisins, nuts and a lot of other ingredients. In times long gone I sometimes baked my cakes “extra tough”. Not the soft sweet spongy things, but more bread like. They were tough enough to survive a day or two in a rucksack and tasty enough that you did not have to put any other fillings on it.
Last time I tried to buy something at ikea, during checkout the (automated) register started asking all kind of stupid questions. Then I understood why the other people before me took so long to get through the payment system I had to wait so long, even though the queue was fairly short. My patience ran out and I just walked away without payment nor my things.
You had a perfect opportunity to spit on self-checkout and you walked out like a total cuck. Shame on you!
surprisingly, i don’t agree with the premise of this article, and i don’t know if that just means i’m an odd duck.
i’m thinking about all of the furniture i’ve assembled.
first, the good: i’ve had a couple sets of the cheapest sheet-metal shelves, and i value those because they are so configurable. i’ll have shelves close together and shelves far apart and random doodads hanging off of all of the unused holes. and there’s lots of cases of furniture that i loved because i modified in it some way. like i used to have an upholstered arm chair that i had built a little table into one of the arms for my coffee and trackball.
but then, the rest: i’ve assembled a bit of ikea furniture, and a lot of the k-mart / martha stewart branded stuff of the same quality. and i don’t think there’s a single exception to the rule that assembling it myself exposed me to how incredibly cheap the materials were. i valued it less because the act of assembling forced me to confront its particle board nature. anchors in particle board! i’ve parted with every single one of those. some of them survived one move but i don’t think any of them survived 2 moves. some of them even went in the trash, no second owner.
ikea furniture is furniture for apartments. when your lease ends after a year or two, you don’t cry so much if you decide to throw it away. it’s just good enough that if you stay in one apartment for 5 years, you don’t necessarily have to replace it in all that time.
i have a grand old diningroom table that looks like it came from the 1950s. i got it off the curb when some college kids moved out. it had been refinished and then painted black and then painted again in beer pong green. and i stripped all of that off and polyurethaned it. that makes me appreciate it more, not because of my own labor, but because i’ve proven it’s indefinitely maintainable. probably my kids will have to cart it out of here when i’m dead.
a weird case is a coffee table i had, from salvation army thrift shop. i had to throw it out because my toddler was eating it, because it was just particle board. but because i didn’t have to assemble it or anything, the fact that it was particle board never bothered me until lil chompy chomps started chomping on it.
Cheap board – reminds me of a wardrobe I had to assemble. That wardrobe SUCKS and I hate it with a passion.
Three of us sweated for 4 hours, and it still came out tilted. The paper-thin backing board couldn’t hold it in shape, when we moved it from flat to up against a wall.
Give me sturdy stuff, and I’ll pay someone to carry it for me.
On one of the pages of an Ikea instruction set I doodled two cartoon ikea characters yelling at each other then on the next page the same two plus a divorce lawyer.
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I’m not a huge fan of ikea for many reasons. I’m with the person above- it’s really crap materials but still prices like 80% of what better furniture would be. Unfortunately even “better” furniture eg pottery barn is still mostly MDF and engineered “wood”
As I get older and grumpier I’m more and more designing and building my own stuff. Not only is it better but I invest the money saved into nice tools too. Examples of that a pin nailer is a game changer and a very nice quality airless sprayer. Frankly a $2 2×4 prepped and painted is so much nicer, stronger and obv cheaper than pretty much any store bought furniture.
I assume this “IKEA effect” is much less pronounced in people who regularly make things, either as their profession or hobby. It’s hard to imagine a cabinet maker or even a model builder taking much pride in assembling some crappy VITTSJÖ or KALLAX shelves.
For one example, see the “Notaklön” guitar effects pedal kit from JHS Pedals. If it had been released as a normal finished pedal, or a normal component kit, no-one would have paid it any attention, but making it a minimal-assembly-required kit that anyone could build (basically putting a couple of prefab boards into a case) made it a phenomenon. They even deliberately copied the Ikea look & feel.