As we come to the part of the showroom with IKEA products for children, Anna picks up one of her latest creations and shows it to me. It's a pillow in the form of a red heart sprouting a pair of arms that end in little hands and fingers. Pretty adorable. I ask her how she got the idea for it.
"A factory in India was making teddy bears, but there was sabotage and the eyes of the teddy bears were coming off," she says. "I was sent there right away. The factory was shut down, and the children had lost their toy pets. We had to design something that the factory could make so that the workers could keep their jobs—something without eyes or buttons. We had a dozen ideas, and this pillow-heart with the arms and hands was one of them. But then it turned out that adults like the pillow too. Sick people in the hospital like holding hands with it, women like to have it in bed with them when their husbands are away."
editors note: I wonder if the childrens reaction to the defective teddy bears was anything like the kids reaction to their x-mas gifts from Skellington in 'nightmare before christmas'.
