Walk through an IKEA and you pass a BILLY bookcase, a HEMNES bed, a STOCKHOLM sofa. It reads like a marketing team having fun with a Scandinavian phonebook.

The real reason is smaller and more human. The man who built the company had trouble with numbers, and the naming system most people file under quirky branding grew out of that.

Ingvar Kamprad founded IKEA in 1943, at age 17. Even the company name is a kind of shorthand: his initials plus the family farm, Elmtaryd, and the nearby village, Agunnaryd. IKEA began as a trading company and soon moved into mail order, with furniture added to the range in 1948.

Products were commonly identified by numerical codes, which created a particular problem for Kamprad.

A founder who couldn’t keep the codes in his head

For Kamprad, numbered product codes were difficult to remember. IKEA now says directly that Kamprad had dyslexia and introduced product names as a more memorable and practical alternative to numerical product codes. A word like a town he knew would stick where a string of digits slid straight through.

Older accounts sometimes presented this as company lore. Fortune, reporting from the IKEA Museum in 2015, wrote that Kamprad described himself as partly dyslexic and used names because they were easier to keep track of than numbers. IKEA itself now states the connection more firmly: his difficulty remembering numerical codes led to the naming approach that later became part of the company’s identity.

The fix that became a filing system

A personal trick for one man doesn’t obviously scale to a company releasing thousands of products a year. What made it last is that Kamprad’s swap wasn’t random. Names got sorted by category, so the type of product tells you what kind of name it carries.

Beds were named after places in Norway. Rugs and other floor coverings have traditionally taken Danish place names. Bookcases take men’s names. Sofas take Swedish place names, and so on down the list.

Seen that way, the system does the same job the numbers were meant to do, just through a different door. Instead of memorizing an arbitrary product code, the names give products a more memorable identity. A memory aid dressed up as branding.

The system now follows formal rules. According to IKEA, a product name runs between four and 12 letters and preferably includes a Swedish letter such as Å, Ä or Ö. It must be a real word, feel good to say, and cannot already be a trademark or a surname. Dedicated naming specialists now handle the process for the 2,000 to 3,000 new products IKEA names each year, working from conventions that grew out of one person’s memory problem.

Why the workaround is the better story

The version you usually hear is the marketing one: aren’t the names charming, isn’t it clever that a bookcase is called BILLY. That framing skips the part that is perhaps most interesting. What became a distinctive piece of IKEA branding began as a practical solution for a founder who found numerical product codes difficult to remember.

That’s a different kind of origin than “genius branding decision.” It’s a fix that outgrew the person who needed it. Kamprad, who died on January 27, 2018, spent his life building what became the world’s largest furniture retailer, and one of its most recognizable quirks traces back to the way his own mind worked.

The Norwegian towns on the beds and the men’s names on the bookcases aren’t there simply to delight you. They’re there because the founder of a growing mail-order business needed an easier way to remember his products, and words behaved for him in a way numbers did not.