Atlantis Studio in Stockholm is where Abba recorded tracks such as “Waterloo”, “Dancing Queen” and “Mamma Mia”.
But on a recent bitter winter day it was home to a different Swedish icon: the most powerful figure in Ikea’s sprawling business empire.
Jesper Brodin, complete with electric guitar, was at the studio to talk both about the flat-pack furniture seller’s commitment to sustainability despite a changing political environment, and his own flirtation with the music industry.
The 56-year-old has run Ingka, the retailer that operates 90 per cent of Ikea stores, for the past seven years, firmly establishing it as the world’s largest furniture seller. But he says he could never have managed it without his passion.
“Sometimes people have an image of CEOs, but most CEOs I know have some quirky hobby. I couldn’t do what I do with work if I didn’t have a hobby,” he said, holding a vinyl copy of his album Critically Endangered Species, released this year under the somewhat random name of Lord Beaverbrook.
With songs musing on humanity, pandemics, climate change and the plight of the snow leopard, the LP was released to little fanfare and an intimate concert at Atlantis, known in Abba’s days as Metronome. “I wanted to not make it too big,” Brodin said, after detailing a music career including playing as a troubadour in Swedish retirement homes and singing in a heavy metal band in Hong Kong. “This has nothing to do with Ikea.”
Ingka, born in Sweden but now headquartered in the Netherlands, has had a tricky few years. The Covid-19 pandemic caused pain through stock shortages and the rare sight of Ikea’s prices going up and down. Ikea spent €2bn cutting prices on much of its furniture in 2024, a year in which its revenues fell 5 per cent to €41.9bn and its net profit almost halved to €806mn.
But Brodin, a former assistant to Ikea’s late founder Ingvar Kamprad, is “a bit optimistic” about 2025. “I have never experienced in my life an era with opportunities like now,” he said. “Interest rates are coming down and people’s appetite for spending is going up. There is a huge pent-up demand for making homes better.”
He added that Ikea was preparing itself for an increase in demand this year, not just in smaller items, such as candles and meatballs, but in big-ticket products, including kitchens and bathrooms.
One possible cloud on the horizon is US President Donald Trump and his trade war threats. The US is Ikea’s second-biggest market, with its €5.5bn in annual sales accounting for roughly 13 per cent of its global total, but the retailer has almost no production there. About 70 per cent of its products come from Europe, with Asia accounting for almost all the rest.
Executives including Brodin have warned that Trump could make it harder for Ikea to keep prices down but have said little else publicly on tariffs.
Where the Ikea boss is prepared to take on the US president more directly is on climate change, and not just the necessity for companies to cut emissions but also the business opportunities arising from it.
“We are fully committed to the Paris agreement,” Brodin said. “For us it makes so much sense — for ethical reasons, for brand reasons but also for a business model perspective.”
Ikea has had some success — since 2016 its carbon emissions have fallen 30 per cent, even as its revenues have risen 24 per cent. Its goal is for a 50 per cent decline by the end of the decade, something Brodin is confident of achieving.
“It’s no longer a vision or a hope; it’s a machine that works in Ikea,” he said. “There are lots of questions in the world today: is sustainability possible? Can we afford it? For us it’s a business model. It’s totally integrated. We are no longer seeing it as [a nice to do] or a burden on the side.”
Ikea has pushed greener products such as LEDs over standard lightbulbs, energy-efficient appliances and water filters. He has been evangelical about the fact that sustainability should not just be for rich people paying top dollar but also in mass-market products. The sustainability drive has pushed Ikea to become smarter in its use of materials, reducing the weight and size of products in a way that has also reduced the company’s costs.
“As soon as we make it economic to help the planet, the products fly out of the door. If you ask people to pay more it doesn’t work,” Brodin says.
But he said the retailer would soon reach the limits of what it can achieve by itself.
“In the next phase, Ikea can do less on its own. We need to do more with governments and other stakeholders,” he said.
Its energy use is largely renewable, and much of its city-centre transport is electric. What remains are trickier issues, especially around raw materials.
Brodin said metals and ceramics were two of the most difficult materials to make sustainable, but that better solutions were coming. He is keen to increase the amount of recycled material Ikea uses but needs help from authorities.
In particular, he wants help with ensuring less material is thrown away and more reused, pointing to the Netherlands where the government banned the incineration of mattresses and Ikea has a booming business in recycling them.
It is also pushing its customers to sell their used furniture, creating a peer-to-peer marketplace Ikea Preowned. Currently on test in Spain and Norway, the platform allows people to sell used items to each other directly, giving them 15 per cent extra if they get paid in Ikea vouchers rather than cash. “In a couple of years, we want to scale it up to all markets in Europe,” Brodin said.