The IKEA effect: why building it yourself makes you value it more

Picture me on the floor of our spare room, half a wardrobe around me, one leftover screw staring back like it’s judging my life choices (it was right to).

2 hours in. Instructions abandoned somewhere around step 11.

By the time that wardrobe stood up on its own, I loved it more than furniture has any right to be loved. Objectively it’s chipboard and good intentions. I’d have fought someone for it.

What did IKEA do?

IKEA’s flat-pack habit began as a shipping and storage fix. The story goes back to a designer sawing the legs off a table just to fit it in a car boot. Any psychological bonus looks like a lucky accident: furniture you assemble yourself means more to you, because you’ve put something of yourself into making it exist.

Rory Sutherland’s favourite illustration of the same effect predates IKEA by decades. An early instant cake mix needed only water added; it flopped. A psychologist diagnosed the problem as too little effort involved for it to feel like real cooking. The fix was one extra step: add an egg yourself. The egg changed nothing about the taste. Sales took off anyway.

Sutherland flags this particular story as folklore rather than verified fact, repeated so often it’s become received wisdom whether or not the original details hold up. The underlying pattern, though, shows up again and again: pick-your-own strawberries cost the same as the pre-picked kind, yet feel more legitimate, because you did the harvesting.

What does the research say?

The obvious assumption is that convenience always wins: strip out friction, cut the steps, remove effort wherever you can find it, and customers will thank you for it.

Sometimes, yes. But effort works like a signature. It tells you, and everyone who sees the result, that you were there for its creation.

Cheap and easy can trigger a quieter, less comfortable question: if this was so good, why didn’t it need me at all?

What’s my take?

Most product teams treat friction as the enemy by default. Fewer clicks, fewer steps; the whole industry optimises toward zero effort as if it were an unquestioned virtue.

The IKEA effect suggests a narrower, sharper question: which specific piece of effort makes someone value the result more, rather than simply survive the process?

Not all friction earns its keep. A confusing checkout is just friction; nobody feels proud of successfully entering their card number. But choosing your own paint colour, naming your own plan, assembling your own desk, that’s a different category of effort entirely, one people carry pride out of rather than resentment.

The sharper question to ask... which one piece of effort should we protect, on purpose, rather than how do we remove all of it?

What’s the last thing you built yourself and loved more for the trouble it caused you?

Mark