This Ikea ‘Lampan’ table lamp was named for the Swedish word for ‘light’. They were first produced in 2002 and sold for €2.5. Lampan is sold in Europe for €2.99, and in the UK for £5.

The designers Carl Öjerstam and Magnus Eleback responded to the challenge to design ‘the world’s cheapest lamp’. The price for customers of €2.50 was set at the design brief stage. The Ikea page for the Lampan reads: “We did everything to keep the price down – we even skipped the box packaging”. This reduction of packaging was achieved by optimising the shape to fit as many lamps as possible in a shipping container. The lampshade itself acts as a container for the base, cable and lightbulb fitting. This was a key motivator for the design, as Öjerstam explained: “We designed the lamp how we wanted it and then changed the scale so that it used the space in the best way possible and we achieved a 100% filling rate. So now 72 pieces fit side by side on a Europallet”.

The lamp is produced in Asia, where labour is cheap compared to other parts of the world and shipped globally. Using container space efficiently enables the lamps to be sold cheaply, as Öjerstam explains: “If I had designed a lamp with perfect proportions we would have reduced the filling rate to, let’s say, 80% and that doesn’t matter so much if you only sell 1000 lamps a year but if you instead sell 10 million lamps that makes a big difference to the price”.