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Ikea announces collaboration with African designers

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Image: James De Villiers (News24)
Image: James De Villiers (News24)

Cape Town – Internationally acclaimed retailer Ikea on Wednesday announced that it will partner with 12 African designers from seven different countries to produce a collection in 2019. 

“We are a very curious company and we want to learn,” Ikea’s head of design Marcus Engman said about the partnership on Thursday.

“The culture of co-design seems very important here [in Africa], you talk about it a lot more here than we do back home and we wanted to be a part of that,” Engman said. 

Ikea’s head of design Marcus Engman speaking at Design Indaba (Image: James De Villiers)

Engman was speaking at Ikea’s Idea workshop at the yearly Design Indaba Festival in Cape Town. The workshop is an interactive space where technical teams from Ikea work together with the African designers on concepts. 

“We really want to explore how to co-create. We don’t only want to talk the talk,” Ikea’s Sweden CEO, Jesper Brodin, said. 

“We are trying to tap into the collective brain of people.”

On Thursday afternoon Ikea designer Kevin Gouriou and Issa Diabaté from the Ivory coast was busy with a concept of a chair in the workshop.

Diabaté was busy trying to decrease the amount of pieces of the chair to eliminate stages of assembly. 

 “I want young people to pay the same price that they usually pay for furniture, but get more,” Diabaté said.

His partner Gouriou said he enjoyed the collaborative space the workshop offered

“What is also interesting is that I am doing the work with Issa but at the same time the other designers are around and giving us ideas,” he said. 

Designers Egypt, Rwanda, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Angola, South Africa and Kenya are all involved in the project. 

Engman said there is an explosion of African influence in design at the moment. 

“What we are seeing, what we have been following is the African influence in fashion, in music such as Solange. More and more there are connections with Africa being made,” he said. 

One of the walls in the Ideas workshop reads that Africa has a very long DIY tradition to create products with little material. 

"It's a kind of hacking or free-styling that's genuinely creative" the text reads. 

Engman said he is not concerned that African design might compete with Ikea’s signature minimalistic design. 

“When Ikea was started in Sweden it was a very poor country, there wasn’t many resources available. Minimalism was born out of necessity,” he said. 

(Image:Supplied)

The team from Ikea undertook a tour of local factories on Thursday afternoon. 

Engman said they are looking into indigenous material to use in the production of the African designed collection. 

“At the moment we are exploring eucalyptus. In a way it’s a little bit like bamboo. We don’t know if it’s going to be workable or not, so let’s see what happens,” he said. 

Engman said the company has no near future plans for a South African expansion.

“There is only one financial policy we have at Ikea and that is that we have to earn it before we spend it which slows down expansion,” he said. 

“Hopefully several of us coming to South Africa will give us a renewed energy to push for expansion here.”

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