I was on the shop floor at IKEA last weekend, walking through the kitchen section, when I noticed something I’d somehow missed every other time I’d been there.
The price tag on the fridge.
I have admired those model kitchens a dozen times. I always assumed the fridge was staging, like the fake fruit in the bowl. It had never occurred to me that IKEA would actually be selling them.
So I did a little digging and here are the facts.
IKEA doesn't manufacture refrigerators. The fridge in the box is made by Whirlpool, Frigidaire, or Midea, depending on the model.
It isn't the cheapest fridge. It falls somewhere in the middle of the price range.
The reviews are mixed. Service complaints are common. Replacement parts can be a pain because the units are custom-specced.
And yet people buy it. A lot of them.
Which left me with one question…
Why Does Anyone Buy This Fridge?
IKEA is not an appliance company. They don’t manufacture compressors or cooling coils. They’re a furniture company with €44.6 billion in global retail sales.
The reason they sell fridges, or any appliance for that matter, is simply because they sell cabinets.
Sounds weird? Let me explain.
Every customer who buys IKEA’s modular kitchen ends up needing appliances. And most third-party appliances don’t fit. The fridges are too deep. The microwaves are the wrong color. The dishwashers stick out past the countertop. They basically ruin the Scandinavian look the customer just spent three hours planning.
That’s the friction. And IKEA stepped into it.
They partnered with Whirlpool, Frigidaire, and Midea. Specced units to the exact dimensions of the modular kitchen. Extended a five-year warranty, four years longer than what those manufacturers offer direct. And dropped it into step 4 of the kitchen planner, right between picking your cabinet doors and checking out.
The customer who came in for cabinets ends up clicking “add fridge” without thinking. They don’t comparison shop. They don’t measure twice. They don’t worry about the warranty.
IKEA pre-solved all of it.
The Playbook, Mapped
The move has three parts. Clean enough to replicate.
Have an anchor.
A core product that’s the reason the customer is in the room. For IKEA, it’s the kitchen.
Identify the friction.
What's the next thing the customer has to figure out right before or after they buy the anchor? Not next year. The next 48 hours. For the IKEA customer, it's "what fridge, microwave, or dishwasher fits this thing I just designed."
Find a partner.
Someone who already builds the thing that solves the friction. You don't have to make it in-house. You curate it, brand it, and integrate it into the same flow as the anchor.
They didn’t get into a new industry. They got deeper into the same customer’s problem.
The fridge is not the product. The complete, frictionless kitchen is the product. The fridge is just what makes it possible.
The Good, The Premature, And The Missing
Not every company that understands this executes it well. I've been thinking about three archetypes, with examples that are happening right now.
The missing ones solve half the problem and walk away.
Calendly is the case I keep coming back to. They booked meetings for a decade and never touched what happened inside or after them. The customer's actual next 48 hours after a meeting got booked were full of friction: who is this person, what did we discuss last time, what notes do I need to take, who follows up. Calendly had years of distribution and watched Granola, Fathom, Otter, and Fireflies build entire companies on the gaps they ignored. They're trying to catch up now with a Notetaker product launched in 2026, but they handed competitors a five-year head start.
The premature ones sell the fridge before anyone wants the cabinet.
Humane is the obvious one. They raised $230M, launched the AI Pin at $699 plus a $24/month subscription, and shipped with a full ecosystem in the box: laser projector, voice OS, gesture controls, plans for an operating system that would eventually live across other devices. The problem was that the anchor product, the pin itself, didn't work. Reviews were brutal. Returns exceeded sales by 2024. HP bought what was left for $116M, less than half of what Humane had raised. They had built the upsells, the platform, the ecosystem, before anyone had agreed that the core thing was worth wearing.
The good ones sell the next mile.
Granola just shipped the cleanest recent example. Their anchor, AI meeting notes, was working. People loved it. So they asked the IKEA question: what's the customer's next 48-hour friction? The answer was sitting in plain sight. Every user frantically Googles the person they're about to meet in the five minutes before the call. Just to get some context. So now, if a meeting is on your calendar, the Granola agent goes off overnight, pulls relevant context about the person you're meeting, and lays it out at the top of the note when you open it. You don't have to search. You don't have to switch apps. The friction you were about to hit is just gone.
The IKEA Test
So when do you actually do this? There are three conditions. Mostly obvious ones. But if you haven't hit one of them, you shouldn't be thinking about the upsell yet.
One: does the anchor have retention? You can't sell the fridge if no one wants the cabinet. Low churn, repeat usage, customers who tell their friends. Those are the prerequisites. If the anchor is leaking, the pre-solve makes it worse, not better. Fix the leak first.
Two: is the upsell the customer’s next 48-hour problem? Not their next year. Not their next adjacent need. The specific thing they're about to do or worry about immediately after they bought from you. A no-code form builder upselling embedded payments works because the user is literally about to need a way to collect money from the form they just built. The same form builder upselling email marketing fails because that's a different workflow on a different day. If you have to explain why the two products belong together, they don't.
Three: does it feel like one product? If the customer has to leave your interface, make a new account, and copy-paste their info into a third-party dashboard, you haven't removed friction. You've moved it. IKEA's fridge appears in the kitchen planner. It doesn't redirect you to Whirlpool's website. Granola's pre-meeting brief opens at the top of the note before your meeting. It doesn't open a separate research tab. The value you're offering is curation and convenience, not just access.
If all three pass, you have a fridge to sell.
The cleanest version of this looks like nothing. The customer doesn’t feel upsold. They feel understood. They came in for the cabinet and left with a complete kitchen, and they’re grateful you thought of everything.
Figure out what yours looks like. It’s probably already sitting in the gap between what your product does and what your customer has to do next, or even right before.
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Sources
Inter IKEA Group. “IKEA Retail Sales FY25.” IKEA Global Newsroom, 2025. (Revenue figures, kitchen/dining FY26 focus.)
IKEA. “Appliance Deals & Offers.” IKEA US. (SUPERKALL model, five-year warranty terms.)
Smart. I would have seen the price tag on the IKEA fridge and thought it was about share of wallet and capturing a little more money on their lower margin product but you're right it's about completing their product more than the revenue.