COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Furniture retailer Ikea is known for the distinctive names of its flat-pack home products.
Now, the company’s Norway branch wants to use the brand’s experience to help parents browsing the baby-naming department.
Ikea Norway has built “a name bank” with more than 800 listings available on its website.
On its site, it prefaces the list with an introduction, “We at IKEA have been naming products for more than 70 years.”
The names are drawn from the ones Ikea gave its furniture instead of product numbers since 1948.
“After all these years, (Ikea) has built up a large ‘catalog’ to pick from,” Ikea Norway said in a statement.
Norway registered the births of 56,060 babies last year or 3,081 more than in 2020.
The Ikea branch says that makes it harder to find a unique name.
Some of the names on the list aren’t so out of the ordinary, including Amanda and Dennis.
Others are an obvious nod to Scandinavia, including Esbjörn and Yngve.
Should parents choose a name from the list, the bright side is it’s not obvious that these are the names of futons, dressers and stools.
