For a Swede it must seem kind of strange to understand the product names. You see an ACORN toy, a NIGEL bookshelf, and the CROYDON sofa... which sounds like it belongs in a council estate flat.

Definately more fun would be the Polish version. How many people can pronounce the BYDGOSZCZ sofa, the PRZEMYSŁAW bookcase and the PSZCZOŁA soft toy?

As a Swede, I always enjoy Ikea product names. Many of them are based on their actual function or category. Some are wordplay related to this. For example:

Rinnig - a kitchen towel called "runny"

Skaftet - a series of standing lamps and lamp stands called "the shaft"

Fejka - plastic plants literally called "to fake"

Knöckla - A garbage bin called "crumple up"

Some I don't get but are still funny

Ostbit - wooden serving tongs called "piece of cheese"?

> BYDGOSZCZ sofa

This may not even be that far off from reality, looking at the sort of names rando brands on Amazon often have...

If the goal is something that reads weird for most Europeans, then try picking names from Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, or Welsh.

its not all that strange tbh - im learning danish which is adjacent enough to swedish that I can understand most of the names - sometimes they aren't relevant to the product function, sometimes they are, but they're just names. Is it strange to you that the word "photoshop" uses english language? what about a Hamburger being named after a place?

Xaoc Devices are the heroes we need, they are yet to release BYDGOSZCZ but KOSZALIN is available to buy:

- https://xaocdevices.com/main/

- https://xaocdevices.com/main/koszalin/

Just go to Polish IKEA and buy the Grzegorz table and Brzęczyszczykiewicz chairs …

It is kind of funny sometimes. Sometimes it’s related to what the thing is (like a pun) and sometimes just random

I'd love seeing some Polish names in products and learning their pronounciation: but as a fellow Slavic language speaker (which there are hundreds of millions of, compared to 10 or 20 million Swedish speakers), I imagine I can do a pretty good job. So I think Swedish is still globally more playful.

(I'd read it as БИЂОШЧ/БИДГОШЧ, ПРЗЕМИСЛАВ and ПШЧОЛА/ПШЧОЉА — you can check on Google Translate if I am close :))

I have always thought this about western media. For all of us in non-us countries, the locations, roads and objects are all slightly foreign to us, giving it that other-world feel movies have.

But for those in the US, wouldn't it all be a bit familiar? Whenever I watch a movie set in my home country with home accents and locations, it always feels a bit too familiar and it can cheapen the feel a bit.

IKEA Poland missed an opportunity here

> CROYDON sofa

I mean.. we have the Windsor Chair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_chair) and the Welsh Dresser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_dresser) and those both slightly predate ikea so it's not a new thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Electron

Would also be more fitting as most of it is made in Poland.

Ikea mobile application has little speaker near the product name that invokes pronunciation - sadly, that's not available on desktop site. I still tend to read Swedish accented letters in these names as German umlauts.

So that wouldn't be a problem if Polish names would be provided with audio examples.

By the way, the communistic period here was full of products using regular words, name of places or people’s names. We had Wisła, Bieszczady wall units. First Polish color TV was Jowisz (Jupiter); first TV ever my mother had was called Szafir (Saphire). Then Szarotka (elderweis) or Sylwia radios from 50s and 60s respectively. A clone of IBM PC with Intel 8086 (or with Russian clone) from 1986 was called Mazovia - Mazowsze which is a historical region of Poland, same name was also used for DOS encoding for that machine.

You have a point but in Branding, it is accepted that bold (noisy) and distinctive (rather than only descriptive) names are an advantage: Creating billion-dollar brands: Vercel, Azure, Windsurf, Sonos, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adyIaTopO6g&t=610 (Jun 2025).