In 1956, an IKEA designer couldn't fit a table into his car in the parking lot.He sawed off the Leg.Most people read the next 70 years as a logistics story: flat-pack saves freight, freight saves margin, margin scales globally.
IKEA's actual moat is psychology, not freight.
The many do not need white-glove delivery. The Billy bookcase (1979, Gillis Lundgren) has sold 110M+ units on that single insight.Just shipped a 9-min breakdown of the Lövet parking-lot incident, the IKEA Effect 2012 paper, and Kamprad's 1976 doctrine on Disclosed:
"We have decided once and for all to side with the many. That sentence is not marketing copy. It is a supply chain decision: the many can assemble things.
The 2012 paper, "The IKEA Effect" by Norton, Mochon, and Ariely (Harvard, Yale, Duke):Participants who assembled cheap furniture themselves rated it as highly as objects made by experts.Labor creates attachment. Attachment reduces returns and grows perceived value simultaneously.
The map showed roughly 1 in 6 American McDonald's couldn't accept a McFlurry order at any given moment. But the broken machines weren't the actual prob.
By FY2022, net revenue was $8.111B. The comeback wasn't a product fix. It was a governance separation.
Just shipped a 9-min breakdown of the see-through pants timeline + Wilson's Bloomberg interview + the 8-year
Lululemon comeback on Disclosed:
https://t.co/hJ345sUzY1
In November 2013, Lululemon's founder went on Bloomberg TV and blamed customers for the see-through pants scandal.
Three weeks later he resigned as chairman.
Lululemon's stock fell roughly in half from 2013 to 2014. That wasn't the market re-pricing yoga pants.
It was the market re-pricing founder-concentration risk.
The question isn't why he said it. It's why a $10B company had no governance layer between its founder and its public image.
The numbers from Lululemon's FY2013 10-K (SEC EDGAR, CIK 0001397187):
Just shipped a 9-min breakdown of the three red lines policy + the Hong Kong winding-up timeline (HCCW 179/2022) on Disclosed:
https://t.co/VCGzoNJyP4
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#BusinessCaseStudies#ChinaProperty
A Hong Kong courtroom in January 2024 ordered China's biggest property developer to wind up.
But the question that matters isn't why Evergrande failed.
It's why Beijing chose to let it fail, on a specific schedule, after a memo distributed in August 2020.
Evergrande's H1 2021 filing on the Hong Kong Exchange (stock 3333) showed total liabilities of RMB 1.96 trillion — about $300 billion.
None of it was hidden. Every credit risk officer with a Bloomberg terminal could see it.