No Assembly Necessary

There's no IKEA store in India, but some of its wealthier citizens have rooms full of handcrafted imitations of the images found in the ubiquitous IKEA catalog.

From the story in the Christian Science Monitor:

When Ms. Bose built her Indian house 10 years ago, she cut pictures from an IKEA catalog and brought them to a carpenter, who furnished her entire two-bedroom bungalow with pieces modeled after them.

King-size beds provide extra storage with built-in drawers. A wall-sized wardrobe has closets, shelves, shoe racks, and a dressing table. A desk, bookshelves, tables, and other pieces of furniture were made with plywood and painted in Bose's favorite colors - red and black. "The design is IKEA, but this is all pure wood," she says, referring to IKEA's use of particle board.

The price was right - about $2,250 for everything. That would be an unimaginable cost for the 80 percent of Indians who live on $2 a day, but it's a fraction of what IKEA would sell all that furniture for in the West (even with its bargain prices), and it's affordable for most middle-class Indians.

IKEA has not taken action against the furniture pirates and have no plans for building an Indian IKEA in the near future.