Do It Yourself!

Maybe they were emboldened by the frank talk of Dick Cheney. Or maybe they’re feeling a little overextended by their thrilling new store in Bloomington, which finally opened in mid-July. Maybe they just aren’t comfortable with their English yet. But Ikea, the upscale Swedish company that sells lots of unassembled Scandinavian furniture, has recently seemed a bit irritable.

On bus shelters in Norway, Ikea has posted ads of supermodels wearing blank expressions and urbane duds. They look preoccupied with the complexities of the good life, lounging among their minimalist home furnishings. Then there is an uncivil invitation spray-painted beside the company’s yellow logo. It says, “Screw Yourself.”

At first, I thought this graffiti must be the work of witty Norske vandals expressing their opposition to this corporate giant from the repugnant nation of Sweden. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that the job was perfectly uniform—as if it had been produced by the same computer that produced the rest of the poster. Oi! No jaded rocker did this. It was Ikea itself, apparently warning its customers of the perils of its wares.

I rang up Ikea in Oslo to ask if they understood what their ad campaign meant to Anglophones. The customer service representative responded in perfect English. “We’ve had many complaints about that. What we meant was ‘build-it-yourself.’ I don’t think that the advertisers understood the other meaning when they made the posters.”

My Norwegian friend Knut didn’t buy it. “Oh, they knew what they were doing. They wanted to appeal to a younger audience, so they used American slang.” Even so, this bizarre double—or triple—entendre is surprising in a country where most people speak nearly flawless English.

Ikea’s line that it was a simple mistranslation also seemed suspicious, because the word skrue (screw) in Norwegian can mean “crazy old kook.” (Norwegians, for example, know Disney’s Uncle Scrooge as Onkel Skrue.) What kind of company would want to associate itself with that old pinchpenny?
Perhaps the ad was meant to revive the friendly rivalry between Sweden and Norway. “See the yellow and blue? That’s very bad for Norway because it’s the Swedish colors!” joked Norwegian banker Arne Wahlstrøm, while pointing at the local Ikea store. “We don’t shop there,” he added. “It’s mostly for students and young people.”

Although they are not backing off in Norway, it’s not likely that Ikea will bring this edgy campaign to the States. At least not before Häagen-Dazs rolls out its “Eat Me!” concept.
—Eric Dregni