Know Your Market: Why IKEA Rocks

As regular readers know, my family and I moved last month. My partner and I have in fact moved seven times in the fourteen years we’ve been together, and we’ve settled into a pattern: visit Home Depot a dozen times in the first month at our new home, and then set off on the first of several trips to IKEA.

We are both unashamed IKEA fans. We love their kid-friendliness, contemporary style, clever details, and of course the low prices. (And no, they’re not paying me to say that.) It’s also a great place to be a dyke. There are more LGBT families per square foot than almost any place but an R Family cruise. You get to feel burly loading all your furniture into the car, and then break out your tools to assemble it when you get home. (Yes, most of their stuff goes together with only the included IKEA wrench, but who doesn’t like an excuse to wear a tool belt? Besides, as I noted in my IKEA Assembly Tips, sometimes you need a few extra gadgets to do the job right.)

The Swedish giant is also good for relationship building. If you’re taking up with a new love, make sure the first thing you bring over (after the toothbrush) is an unassembled IKEA Expedit bookcase. If you’re still on speaking terms after you put it together, you know you have a keeper. If not, don’t bother unpacking the rest of the U-Haul.

Kudos to IKEA, too, for having their TV ad “Living Room” nominated for the Commercial Closet 2007 Images in Advertising Award. They’re one of two nominees that depict LGBT parents in their ads. TIME magazine is the other, with a print ad showing two moms and a baby, and the line “Are gay families different? (Other than making the statement ‘Go ask your mother’ twice as complicated.) TIME. Know why.”

Now if only R Family offered a trip to Sweden so we could visit the fount of all IKEAness. . . .

(Thanks to National Gay News for the ad-award tip.)