‘We are very nerdy’: An exclusive interview with Ikea’s top designer

Ikea design manager Johan Ejdemo is looking years into the future.

A towering Swede with a six-inch beard, Ejdemo is a trained cabinetmaker who has nearly 30 years of experience at Ikea. Since 2022 he’s been the company’s design head, leading a team of 20 in-house designers in Sweden and a roster of freelancers from around the world. Together they give shape to the 1,500 to 2,000 new products Ikea releases every year. Most have been brewing in the company’s design department for several years, if not more than a decade.

I recently met with Ejdemo at Ikea’s headquarters in Älmhult, Sweden, the city a two-hour train ride from Copenhagen where the company was founded in the 1940s. Before leading me on an exclusive tour of the company’s prototyping shop—the first tour Ikea has ever granted to a journalist—we sat down to talk about what’s guiding the brand’s design approach in 2026.

As he looks to shape what products Ikea stores will be selling years down the line, he says the focus isn’t so much on individual items or areas of the home, but rather on things like material choices and emotional responses. It’s all in service of what Ikea refers to as democratic design, or high quality products that have been so precisely optimized and scaled that they hit the lowest possible price point. Achieving that ideal, Ejdemo argues, is the real work of Ikea’s designers.

“We are very nerdy,” he says. “We go very deep in the details.”

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

Fast Company: How is design changing for Ikea in 2026, and what are the things that are driving those changes?

Ejdemo: One thing that we are considering a lot in design today is circularity. And it sits in the complete value-chain perspective. That is the thing that is dramatically new in the context of designing products.

What types of products are you prioritizing?

The desire for optimism, playfulness, and human interaction is very close to us today in designing and developing products. That’s very evident in some of the launches and collection drops that we have done recently, and they will be even more evident into the future. But it’s not only about silliness and playfulness and color. It could be in natural materials and warmth. There are many dimensions to this.

Are there specific types of products or parts of the home that you find yourself focusing on today?

No, but there’s always a challenge when there’s a desire for certain products that are big and bulky. Those are always challenging areas for us because things have to be transported and it costs a lot to transport them, and also they can consume a lot of material if you’re not thinking through them smartly.

A lot is connected to the comfort of mattresses and sofas, but I think we are ahead of the game there. We’re very good in building premium comfort in our products in a very material-efficient way—reducing the use of foam and still achieving even better comfort than when these products were very foam-dependent.

And on wardrobes, for example, we just recently launched a new kind of easy assembly so we aren’t putting it in the hands of the consumer to do all the work. It’s making it easy for the consumer and at the same time makes production more efficient. Those wardrobes are made out of particle board, but there’s more density in the areas where you drill holes for shelves, less density where you don’t it. So even there, we are very nerdy. We go very deep in the details of where we can save material. It’s like, here we need extra and we don’t have it where it doesn’t make sense. We’re distributing value and cost within the product.

How, if at all, is AI changing how you work or influencing choices you make about what moves on from concept to product?

We don’t use AI in design. There’s still a lot of implications [to the technology]. We are all regulated by the tools that we use, and they need to be approved to use. There might come some kind of AI support that could be helpful for designers, but we don’t have it today. There’s a legal aspect to it, too. If you use AI in the design process you can’t claim design rights, for example. We try to avoid getting into that ditch.

But in the process, making a visualization of how a picture could look for material that could be used in communication later on, just to make a mock-up, there I’ve seen AI come in quite handy to enable people to see like, oh yeah, that’s the direction we’d like to go. It’s not designing the end product that they use. It just comes in like any other tool that has simplified something. Image making used to be painting and then you had photography and then it became digitalized and so on. And now you can add an AI layer to it as well that could be helpful.

As you’re leading this team of designers both in-house and outside the organization, how do you encourage them to take creative risks when they’re developing new concepts?

I really have to force them. I mean, if you’ve been designing for 20 years, plus or minus, you start to edit yourself too quickly because you know too much. But that’s also one of the more strategic reasons why I always have three to four interns on a team; they just add something else to the dialogue. They explore, they do things, and they are all mentored by in-house designers so you get that conversation and interaction going.

It’s hard to tell someone you need to dare more. It’s like, how do you just get it into the culture of the design team? It’s also on an individual level. Someone will always stretch a lot, someone else will be more straight on the job, and for someone else maybe we could dare them a little bit more. So it’s also coaching on an individual level. They’re not one person. They think differently and do things differently and their creative processes look different as well.