Making home a safer place
There is nothing more important to IKEA than the health and safety of our customers. We talked to Vladimir Brajkovic about product testing and why it’s so essential with customer feedback.
A safer life is a better life. The entire IKEA business, from designers and suppliers to the co-workers in the stores, works towards creating a safer life at home for customers.
“With more than 75 years’ of experience in life at home we take pride in developing products with safety and quality at heart”, says Vladimir Brajkovic, Range and Product Engineering Manager at IKEA.
Through risk assessments, testing and evaluation, IKEA makes sure that each product is safe in itself – from product idea, through the design and development process, into the finished product offered to customers. And they continue to test and evaluate the products throughout their lifetimes to ensure they continue to live up to the demanding standards IKEA has as well as customer’s expectations.
Product testing is an important part of the developing process at IKEA, and all products are tested carefully in many different ways. There are two certified test labs, one in Älmhult and one Shanghai. Together they have a combined test area of about 20,000 square meters. Here, over 250 people work full time, making sure that IKEA products are durable, sustainable and safe to use. In addition to these labs, IKEA also works with several independent accredited test labs across the world and all together, performs over a million product and material tests each year.
“We always evaluate the safety, quality, and environmental impact in a wide range of areas such as chemicals, fire, surfaces, corrosion, lighting and electronics, function and durability, washing and assembly,” says Vladimir Brajkovic,
Customer feedback from around the world is continuously gathered to learn how people use and experience IKEA products. All these insights are taken into consideration so that the product range can improve over time.
“Product safety is not only important at IKEA; it is essential to IKEA. Our vision to create a better everyday life for the many people with the vast experience we have in life at home necessitates the approach that you can be a leader of life at home and serve the many people only if you are the leader at safer life at home,” says Vladimir.