A man in a small town in southern Sweden, holding a leaf-shaped side table and a set of car keys, doing the mental math that anyone who has ever moved house knows too well. The table won’t go in the car. The angles are wrong, and there is a photo shoot to get to. He stares at the problem for a moment, then does the obvious thing: he takes the legs off, lays them flat next to the tabletop, and drives away.

That man was Gillis Lundgren, and the small town was Älmhult. The year was 1956. What he did is now one of the stories IKEA tells about how flat-packing became central to the company.

It’s a good story, and like a lot of good origin stories, it’s tidier in the retelling than the history really was.

The moment with the table

The table was the LÖVET, a small three-legged piece shaped like a leaf. Lundgren began working with IKEA on its catalogue before becoming a full-time employee, and IKEA Museum describes him as the company’s fourth employee. His work included illustrating catalogue covers, photographing products and, increasingly, designing furniture.

According to IKEA, Lundgren was tasked with taking a table to a studio for a catalogue photograph and found that it would not fit in his car. He removed the legs. Inc. recounts the episode the same way, describing Lundgren removing the legs of a table in 1956 so it would fit.

IKEA’s own version leans into the drama. As the company tells it, “His car couldn’t fit the table, so he thought to himself, ‘Why not take off the legs?'” 

Why “invented” is the wrong word

The neat version credits Lundgren with inventing flat-pack furniture. That’s where the story overreaches. Ready-to-assemble and flat-packed furniture existed long before 1956, and IKEA itself now gives a much fuller history. IKEA Museum notes that the Thonet chair was being shipped disassembled in the nineteenth century and that Swedish department store Nordiska Kompaniet introduced its Triva flat-pack furniture series in 1944.

More importantly, IKEA itself was already selling customer-assembled furniture before Lundgren’s famous car episode. According to the museum, supplier Ovendals showed Ingvar Kamprad a table with fittings that made customer assembly easier, and the 1953 IKEA catalogue offered three tables — DELFI, RIGA and KÖKSA — for assembly at home.

That makes the 1956 story better understood as an important symbol of IKEA’s developing flat-pack philosophy than its literal beginning. Even another IKEA history page says that while Lundgren was not the inventor, he helped popularize the idea and apply it across the IKEA range.

Guinness World Records still credits Lundgren with inventing flat-pack furniture in Älmhult in 1956. That claim conflicts with IKEA Museum’s more detailed history, which documents earlier flat-pack furniture and IKEA self-assembly products before that date.

On the evidence available, the museum’s account is the safer one.

The workaround that became a system

What makes the car story important is what IKEA did with the same basic principle. Flat furniture can take up less space in transport and warehouses, freight costs can fall, and vulnerable parts such as table legs are less exposed to damage. Customer assembly also shifts some of the work away from factories and retailers.

Flat, densely packed and stackable packages allow far more products to fit into trucks, containers, warehouses and stores. Eventually designers began thinking about packaging and transport while products were still on the drawing board. Flatness stopped being merely a way of packing furniture and became part of how IKEA designed it.

Lundgren went on to design more than 200 pieces for IKEA, including the BILLY bookcase in 1979. It became one of the company’s defining products, with more than 140 million units sold worldwide.

What we take from a problem solved sideways

The reason the Lundgren story survives isn’t really that one person invented an industry in a car park, because the history does not support that version. It is that an ordinary constraint captured, in one memorable scene, the logic IKEA was learning to build into its furniture.

A bigger car would have solved Lundgren’s immediate problem. Taking the table apart suggested something more useful: furniture does not necessarily have to travel in the shape in which it will eventually be used.

The table wouldn’t fit, so he took off the legs. He did not invent flat-pack furniture that afternoon, but the story neatly captures the principle IKEA would turn into one of the most recognizable retail systems in the world.