IKEA in Saudi Arabia
The IKEA brand’s origins dated to 1943, when, at the age of 17,
Ingvar Kamprad started his own company in Sweden selling fish,
vegetable seeds, and magazines by bicycle. He called the company
IKEA, which combined his initials with those of his family farm,
Elmtaryd, and parish, Agunnaryd, located in southern Sweden.
Four years later he started a mail-order catalog.9 In 1948, Kamprad
added furniture and house wares to his mail-order products, and in
1951, opened a display store in nearby village of Älmhult to allow
customers to preview products before buying.
Company Values of IKEA is too create a better everyday life for
the many people” by selling affordable, quality furniture to mass-
market consumers around the world.
In 2004 IKEA Group became a participant in the United Nations (UN)
Global Compact, an initiative for companies to follow standards and
best practices globally, by taking the responsibility of universally
upholding human right standards
By 2012, Inter IKEA Systems franchised 338 IKEA stores in 40
countries, the large majority of them (298 in 26 countries) to IKEA
Group and the rest to eleven local franchisees worldwide.21
Between September 2011 and August 2012, eleven new IKEA
stores had opened and seven IKEA stores had been relocated
worldwide.
By August 2012, the IKEA brand offered a range of 9,500 home
furnishing solutions and products, showcased in their IKEA catalog.
The company printed 212 million catalogs in 29 languages and 62
editions
the catalog was updated based on feedback from the previous
year. Inter IKEA Systems indicated that the catalog needed to be
relevant in all of IKEA’s markets and at the same time reflect what
the brand stood for. Inter IKEA Systems had the overall
responsibility for the content of the IKEA catalog.
IKEA in Saudi Arabia
Inter IKEA Systems had a tradition of abiding by local norms in the
Middle East.

in accordance with local customs, restaurants in the Saudi IKEA

stores were split into two areas separated by a partition: one section
for families and women, the other area for single men

Inter IKEA Systems also allocated rooms in its Saudi stores to be

mosques, usually used for prayer several times a day. During
prayer time, IKEA stores closed their doors for new customers for
around 25 minutes, while allowing customers in the store to
continue shopping, a practice prevalent among all other retail stores
in Saudi Arabia.

There are no music in stores in Saudi Arabia.

The company’s Saudi stores displayed women dressed in traditional

local clothes and wearing a headscarf, while men in its online ads
wore the traditional long white dress. Similar advertisement
customizations were prevalent in other stores in the Middle East,
such as in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was an independent monarchy. The
king, also custodian of the Two Holy Mosques of Mecca and
Medina, Islam’s holiest sites, was head of the state and governed
the country through a council of ministers on which he served as
president.

Sharia law was derived from the Qur’an, considered by Muslims to

be a revelation from God, and the Hadith, which included reports
and narratives of the life of Prophet Muhammad. Sharia law
prescribed both religious and secular duties.

The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice

(Mutaween), sometimes called the “religious police,” was a special
committee of around 3,500 Saudi men that handled the
enforcement of the kingdom’s strict moral code, including the ban
on women driving, the public dress- code requirements for women,
and the separation of the sexes in public spaces.
 The IKEA Saudi Catalog Scandal :

On October 1, 2012, an article titled

The IKEA “Women Cannot be Retouched Away” in

the issue of the free Swedish newspaper
Metro revealed that the fall 2012 catalog of

Catalog Inter IKEA Systems for Saudi Arabia had

erased women out of the catalog

The Metro newspaper noted that it was not

scandal forbidden to depict women in advertising or

print in Saudi Arabia and that Inter IKEA
Systems had self-censored its catalogs
distributed in the Middle East for 20 years
The Global Reaction
Jacqui Hunt, a director in the London
office of Equality Now, a global non-
governmental organization fighting
discrimination against woman around the
world, indicated: “Women are equal and
integral members of society and cannot
just be airbrushed out. The IKEA Group
has to take responsibility for the messages
it is sending and take extra care,
particularly as a global corporation, to
promote messages of equality and non-
discrimination of all peoples.
Ann Elizabeth Mayer, a professor of legal
studies and business ethics at Wharton
added, “IKEA has gone out of its way to
advertise its support for [NGOs defending
women rights]. Where do things stand now
that IKEA has taken an ill-considered step
that leaves it open to criticism for becoming
an active collaborator in official Saudi
strategies to render women invisible and
powerless?”
Reaction of Saudi Media

Saudi media did not show much interest in the news. The media, largely regulated,
simply channeled the news from Metro magazine without providing opinions. Al-
Arabiya, a major pro-Saudi News Channel, reported the news with the headline: “A
vanishing act? IKEA ‘erases’ women from Saudi catalog.