The easiest joke to make about IKEA is that few of its products—from shelves to meatballs—are made from what they seem. But even particleboard still requires wood—and a lot of it, when you’re selling 100 million products every year. 
 
 According to Pacific Standard, IKEA uses almost one percent of the world’s commercial wood supply. That’s 17.8 million cubic yards, or 3.2 million cubic miles .00326499108 cubic miles. 
 
 Plenty of critics would argue that IKEA is unnecessarily depleting the world's forests, given the short half-life of most of its products. To its credit, though, IKEA seems pretty committed to sourcing its materials sustainably; 25 percent of its wood is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, which ensures that the wood is legally and sustainably sourced (the goal is to increase that figure to 50 percent within the next five years). 
 
 It turns out that IKEA actually split its wood sourcing and production arm into its own company, Swedwood, back in 1991. Right now, it employs 15,000 people at 46 different manufacturing sites, where the engineering group sources, harvests, and readies raw wood for production. Now, if only some intrepid photojournalist would go visit. [Pacific Standard] ||||| And we don’t mean the local church. It is an astonishing but sobering fact that people are twice as likely to flock to their Ikea store than to church on Sundays. The only service they partake in takes place in front of a cash till, not an altar. 
 
 
 
 It has been claimed that more people read the Ikea catalogue than the Bible. Indeed if you stay in a hotel in certain parts of Ikea’s homeland in southern Sweden you will find the latest Ikea catalogue next to the customary New Testament. 
 
 
 
 One in 10 Europeans now living was supposedly conceived on an Ikea bed. The resulting babies are likely to sleep in an Ikea cot while their parents sit on Ikea sofas and eat off Ikea crockery which they store in Ikea cupboards. A third of all kitchens sold in France and Sweden are from Ikea. In Norway it’s half. Here in Britain we lag behind a bit but not much. 
 
 
 
 Last year with much of the world stuck in recession the Swedish furniture and homewares retailer delivered record annual net profits of £3.2billion. Sales in the 44 countries with Ikea stores grew by almost 10 per cent to a staggering £27.6billion. 
 
 
 
 All of which should add a satisfying element to the 87th birthday tomorrow of Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad. But Mr Kamprad, a widower, does not go in for extravagances such as birthday parties. For despite featuring regularly in lists of the world’s richest billionaires, the man who persuaded the British to “chuck out the chintz” is notoriously careful with money. 
 
 
 
 He could easily afford a private jet but would rather fly economy class and preferably on a budget airline. Arriving at a gala to receive a Businessman Of The Year Award he was at first refused entry because he had come on the bus. At home he drove an ancient Volvo for years until he was persuaded that it was too dangerous. 
 
 
 
 Rather than dining in Michelin starred restaurants he likes to drop in to one of his stores for a cheap meal of his favourite Swedish meatballs. In cafeterias he swipes the little packets of salt and pepper to take home. 
 
 
 
 Admittedly he has lived in Switzerland as a tax exile since 1976. But his home is a modest bungalow and he assembled every stick of Ikea flatpack furniture in it himself. 
 
 
 
 He regards luxury not merely as an indulgence but almost as a sin. In his memoir Testament Of A Furniture Dealer he wrote: “We don’t need flashy cars, impressive titles, uniforms or other status symbols. We rely on our strength and our will!” 
 
 
 
 Employees – although he prefers to call them “co-workers” – at Ikea HQ are told to use both sides of a sheet of paper and get a telling-off if they leave the lights on when leaving a room. Certainly anyone encountering him doing his shopping in the local market (always near closing time when vendors are more likely to drop their prices) dressed in his scruffy coat would assume he was just another elderly gent living on a tight budget rather than the fifth wealthiest entrepreneur in the world. 
 
 
 
 And that is just how Ingvar Kamprad likes it. Ever since he started his business in 1943 when he was just 17, he has controlled his own and his company’s public image with consummate skill. ||||| Ikea A woman photographed in the standard version of the IKEA catalog, left, is missing from pages of the Saudi version, right. 
 
 STOCKHOLM—Representatives for Swedish furniture giant IKEA on Monday apologized for removing women from some of the photos in catalogs shipped to Saudi Arabia, and said the blame lies squarely with them, not the local franchisee. 
 
 The move to manipulate photos sparked criticism from government officials in Sweden and raised questions about how IKEA is living up to its own values. 
 
 IKEA apologized for removing women from some of the photos in catalogs shipped to Saudi Arabia, and said the blame lies squarely with them, not the local franchisee. Dow Jones's Anna Molin reports. Photo: Ikea 
 
 IKEA's catalog is shipped all over the world, with the company this year expected to publish 200 million copies with 62 different versions. The bulk of the catalog is exactly the same in most markets, but the company has said in the past it tailors the images to suit fashion-related tastes of local markets. 
 
 In some cases, however, the catalog is changed to align with cultural standards. 
 
 A comparison of the Saudi catalog to a standard version of the catalog showed that several women photographed in the standard version are missing from pages of the Saudi version. Otherwise, the photos throughout the catalog appear to be virtually identical. 
 
 The discrepancy was reported earlier by Metro, a free newspaper in Stockholm. 
 
 A spokeswoman for Inter IKEA Systems B.V. – the arm of IKEA that oversees all franchisees including the company's three Saudi Arabia stores—said the move is in conflict with company values and IKEA is reviewing its procedures as a result. 
 
 "We're deeply sorry for what has happened," Ulrika Englesson Sandman said. "It's not the local franchisee that has removed the photos. The error has occurred in the process of producing the proposal to Saudi Arabia, and that is ultimately our responsibility." 
 
 IKEA Homes, Minus the Women Compare a photo from the Saudi IKEA catalog and a standard version. View Graphics Photos: IKEA 
 
 The company is investigating why a decision to omit some women in its proposal for the Saudi catalog was taken, and said it would look into whether digital revisions could be made in hindsight. 
 
 Ms. Englesson Sandman said the omissions were completely needless since Saudi Arabia doesn't prohibit women from being depicted in marketing material. "We understand why people are upset," she said. 
 
 Saudi Arabia is often criticized for treatment of women that includes forbidding travel, study or work without permission from their male guardians. Saudi Arabia also prohibits women from driving a car. 
 
 "As a producer of the catalog, we regret the current situation," Ylva Magnusson, spokeswoman for IKEA Group, an Inter IKEA Systems affiliate that runs 298 of 337 IKEA stores world-wide and is responsible for the catalog, said. "We should have reacted and realized that excluding women from the Saudi Arabian version of the catalog is in conflict with the IKEA Group values." 
 
 IKEA Group operates most IKEA franchises but not the ones in Saudi Arabia. 
 
 Ms. Magnusson said the company is reviewing its routines to ensure that the different versions of the IKEA catalogs correspond to its antidiscrimination and human-rights policies. 
 
 "We encourage fair treatment and equal employment opportunities without regard to race, ethnicity, religion, gender, disability, age or sexual orientation," she said. 
 
 The retailer has long aimed to avoid the political spotlight, but has had difficulty steering clear of scrutiny given the size of its operation and the amount of countries it does business in. 
 
 "You cannot remove or retouch women out of reality," Swedish trade minister Ewa Bjorling said in an email. "If women aren't allowed to be seen or work then Saudi Arabia is losing half of its intellectual capital." Ms. Bjorling said the images are another sad example that show there is a long way to go in terms of equality between women and men in Saudi Arabia. 
 
 IKEA's catalogs are one of the company's primary marketing materials. In recent years, IKEA has changed the way it creates many of the pages in its catalog, abandoning traditional photo shoots in some cases in favor of purely digital design. This enables easier manipulation of photos so designers can, for instance, switch colors in a room to meet the tastes of a local market, or remove a vase of flowers from a table. 
 
 In the standard version of the new catalog, one photo features a woman wearing pajamas and standing in the bathroom with a young boy next to her and a man kneeling behind while wrapping another young boy in a towel. But in the Saudi catalog, the woman has disappeared from the picture, leaving only what looks like a father and his sons in the bathroom. 
 
 In another picture, a woman standing in the middle of a room surrounded by IKEA's new colorful design collection has been erased from the Saudi version of the catalog, leaving only men in the room. Some pictures featuring women have also been removed completely from the catalog or replaced with other pictures, though not all women and girls have been wiped out. 
 
 This is the second time in less than two weeks that IKEA's marketing photos have stirred political controversy. 
 
 The company, looking to avoid a potential political fallout, on Sept. 21 deleted a photo from its Russian corporate Web page showing four young people in balaclavas that could have been viewed as a gesture of support for three jailed members of Russian punk group Pussy Riot. The deleted photo was part of a Russian marketing campaign that included a photo competition in Russian MEGA shopping malls, which receive about 200 million visitors per year. 
 
 —Sven Grundberg contributed 
 
 to this article.
– IKEA, the Swedish furniture chain so massive it employs 150,000 people in hundreds of stores in almost 30 countries, now eats up an incredible 1% of the world's entire commercial wood supply, reports Pacific Standard. That was 17.8 million cubic yards in 2012—an amount so unfathomable that for more than 20 years IKEA, which was incorporated in 1943, has managed it all through its own wood sourcing and production company, Swedwood, reports Gizmodo. IKEA does appear to be trying to harvest some of that wood sustainably, with 23% of it certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, meaning it is both sustainably and legally sourced, IKEA reports. Still, there is no sidestepping the company's impact worldwide. With 212 million copies printed every year, its catalog is more than twice as widely distributed as the Bible, and the company distributed a whopping 2.5 billion little wooden dowels in 2011, according to the Telegraph, which adds that an estimated one in five babies in the UK was conceived in an IKEA bed. (Speaking of baby-making, check out how IKEA recently celebrated Valentine's Day.)