“I was trying to find something that offered the storage of a bin, but looked like a piece of furniture.”
Oh, the life of an Ikea parent.
I’ve seen these poor, beleaguered souls with my own eyes — frowns on their faces, hands slick with sweat, eyebrows scrunched as they try to make sense of an instruction sheet polluted by 40 different steps and 10 alternately sized nails. I pity these glum Ikea dwellers, these sad and miserable humans who envisioned building a beautiful piece of furniture in 10 minutes, only to be trapped in the never ending hell of a Saturday stolen by hard carpentry. Ikea parents struggle to break from their habits and once trapped, spends years inside the decrepit wasteland of buying, building, and filling houses with a Frankenstein mishmash of chairs, tables, and dressers that squeeze every ounce of space from sight. Before long, Ikea parents have lost the three things that every human holds dear — time, space, and hope.
The genesis of every business idea begins with the same question: what if things were different? Just because Ikea parents have always existed inside a suspended purgatory of lengthy instruction lists and jumbo-sized tool bags, doesn’t mean they should be confined there for eternity. Just because furniture and storage containers have traditionally been separate units, doesn’t mean it always must be so. And just because you’ve never heard of Linqwood, doesn’t mean they aren’t ready to change the world of furniture.
“When I buy a piece from Ikea it’s horrible, everybody knows that experience,” said Brian Sneddon, founder of Linqwood. “Getting excited about buying a unit from Ikea and then pulling out a bag of 200 parts and pieces, then spending four hours of the afternoon putting a shelf together. What if I could make something that didn’t have any parts or didn’t need any tools, and when I took it apart, there was no spare stuff to lose?”
Sneddon has lived the life of an Ikea parent, crammed into a condo with three of his sons. With limited room, space and furniture were at a premium. Intent on solving the dilemma, Sneddon began applying his expertise in construction, architecture, and design to the problem at hand.
“I was trying to find something that offered the storage of a bin, but looked like a piece of furniture,” Sneddon said.
After countless time spent experimenting, Sneddon arrived at his destination — the Linqwood storage cube, equal parts storage container and furniture, that can be assembled in seconds without tools or millions of parts. Sneddon originally was creating the cubes just for himself, but soon realized Ikea parents everywhere would hyperventilate at the possibilities.
“People that I would talk to were saying, ‘That’s a great idea, can I get some of those?’” Sneddon said. “So I thought, maybe I should look into this as an actual product.”
Hundreds of hours of refinement and one utility patent later, Linqwood has created the modernized storage cube. Featuring the Qlikr system, Linqwood’s storage cubes use simple, snap-based technology to ease the pain of assembly. Instead of spending hours slaving away, wondering which screw goes where, you snap five pieces together and it’s game on. Cubes can be stacked and used as whatever piece of furniture your heart desires — dresser, table, media stand, etc. Ikea parents who have been searching for answers, welcome to the world of modular furniture storage.
“I’ve created these storage cubes that can stack and do things, but the system can be applied to anything in the furniture world, a desk, an entertainment unit, anything like that,” Sneddon said. “The connection concept really could be used to eliminate the headache people have in putting modular or assembled, Ikea-type furniture together.”
