“It couldn’t be anything but intentional for a gigantic, well-organised company like Ikea to have used Danish names for its doormats,” a reader wrote in a letter to a Danish newspaper. These comments follow a scientific analysis of the Ikea catalogue conducted by the University of Copenhagen. Academics claim to have discovered a pattern whereby high-end items – chairs, beds, home furnishings– get named after Swedish, Finnish and Norwegian towns. But lesser products such as doormats and toilet seats are named after Danish towns. Danish academic Klaus Kjöller argues that Ikea’s naming system “symbolically portrays Denmark as the doormat of neighbouring Sweden, a country with a larger economy and population”. Many Danes believe that the researchers were absolutely right to point out what they perceived as Ikea insults.