IKEA Norway turns 70 years of product names into a baby-name catalogue

In 2022 Norwegian media were full of a different kind of pandemic story: a baby boom. IKEA cited almost 3,000 more children born in Norway in 2021 than the year before, an increase of more than 5%. The retailer itself sat in an unusual position — supply problems meant it could not launch or even talk about new products, because it did not have any to show.

TRY, IKEA Norway's agency, spotted the overlap between the two stories. IKEA had been giving its products human names since its first catalogue in 1950, so why not offer parents a bank of those names? IKEA loved the idea but set a condition: find more than 50 names and they would go ahead. The team manually trawled more than 70 years of catalogues — digitised but not searchable — and came back with more than 800 human-sounding names, from popular Ivar to rarer ones like Moalie.

Every name received a description written by the team itself and was paired with the product that carried it in an A-Z Name Directory on IKEA Norway's website, supported by a printed Norwegian catalogue and a 'Velkommen babyboom' film. To meet parents where they actually were, the team walked copies into the waiting rooms of private clinics after public facilities said no commercial material was allowed. A straightforward press release then did the rest: the story moved through Denmark, Germany and New Zealand before being picked up by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

IKEA and TRY called the response overwhelmingly good and impossible to measure in babies — although at least one couple admitted naming their son Tim after a 1960 trolley table, and parents thanked the brand in comment sections. The campaign won the PR Grand Prix at the Epica Awards 2022 and a Cresta Bronze for its campaign website, and the catalogue itself kept appearing in waiting rooms and on social media for months afterwards.