IKEA, Sweden’s Jewel

Similarly, if kitchen items are designed to be stackable, shipping pallets can contain far more items, thus saving costs, and passing those savings on to the consumer. An example is the design of the IKEA BANG coffee mugs that stack into themselves, enabling a pallet to contain 2,000 rather than the usual 400 of a traditional design. With this kind of efficiency, IKEA sells these handsome little mugs for only 50 cents each. And 25 million are projected to be sold in the coming year. What’s more, since many of IKEA’s customers have small kitchens—as in starter homes or college apartments—these mugs take up 80 percent less room on the shelf.