Something I would love to see is an open-source attitude entering into the furniture manufacture ecosystem.
What Ikea sells you is, essentially:
a) a set of instructions for making furniture out of basic components
b) those components, produced and distributed through a highly-efficient supply chain
So break those two apart! Let hobbyists and carpenters share or sell their furniture designs. Just specify the components in a standard way, so suppliers can compete to supply the components for each design.
So you turn a monolithic business into one where smaller groups can compete on each part of the system. One company can cheaply supply cut wood in Seattle, another just sells its funky shelving designs without worrying about the infrastructure.
Most bits of this ecosystem already exist -- the furniture-making hobbyists, the DIY stores, the suppliers of nails and screws. They just need a bit of systemisation (and marketing) to pull them together into a system that can compete with a monolithic supply chain.
What Ikea sells you is, essentially:
a) a set of instructions for making furniture out of basic components b) those components, produced and distributed through a highly-efficient supply chain
So break those two apart! Let hobbyists and carpenters share or sell their furniture designs. Just specify the components in a standard way, so suppliers can compete to supply the components for each design.
So you turn a monolithic business into one where smaller groups can compete on each part of the system. One company can cheaply supply cut wood in Seattle, another just sells its funky shelving designs without worrying about the infrastructure.
Most bits of this ecosystem already exist -- the furniture-making hobbyists, the DIY stores, the suppliers of nails and screws. They just need a bit of systemisation (and marketing) to pull them together into a system that can compete with a monolithic supply chain.