If Ikea Has Its Way, Your Baby Will Be Named Malm

Have you thought about Malm, Kivik, or Trotten? Swedish 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. The names are drawn from ones Ikea has given to its furniture instead of product numbers since 1948, per the AP. "After all these years, [Ikea] has built up a large 'catalog' to pick from," Ikea Norway says in a statement.

Ikea names its products after Swedish towns, lakes, and other geographical features, but it also uses names that have traditionally gone to people. The branch notes that while retailers saw "both a shortage of raw materials and challenges with delivery times" during the COVID-19 pandemic, "there is at least no shortage of children" in Norway. The Scandinavian country registered the births of 56,060 babies last year, or 3,081 more than in 2020. The increase creates "a challenge in finding unique names," Ikea Norway says.

(More Ikea stories.)