Everything IKEA does has hidden creativity that solves problems, often problems people don’t really notice. It is part of their design philosophy that creates THE WONDERFUL EVERYDAY.

There's a problem with hidden creativity, it’s hard to get people to see it, never mind talk about it. So we tapped into the Sofa Planning tool. Yup, it’s not that exciting unless you have the specific problem of planning your sofa. Only 50 of the 250,000 IKEA.com visits a day were to use it to plan sofas, but we had a naturally viral meme just waiting to be unleashed on the world.

We found a small group of techsters subverting the Sofa Planning tool for their own amusement; drawing spiral sofas, labyrinthian sofas and phallic sofas. They even created words using it. In response we released the IKEA SOFFA SANS font built from 38 different sofa configurations using our planning tool.

We found a small group of techsters subverting the Sofa Planning tool for their own amusement, drawing spiral sofas, labyrinthian sofas, creating words or letters and many phallus sofas - this gave us an idea.

We released IKEA SOFFA SANS - a real, downloadable, usable font, built from 38 different sofa configurations on the sofa planning tool in multiple colours, 3D and 2D.

Promoted via integrating with the pre-existing social threads, supported across owned social platforms, IKEA.co.uk and a PR push - the font encouraged consumers to engage with the hidden creativity of our tool. We new design blogs, tech blogs and mainstream nerdist types would pick it up.

The font was co-created – with people winning free sofas for helping us to finish the font, by creating the punctuation marks. The final version was completed by the public - extending the conversation, driving to the tool and promoting