IKEA Let's Relax Challenged Sweden's Obsession With Perfect Food
IKEA's "Let's Relax" is a 2016 Swedish film campaign, created by Stockholm ad agency Acne, that challenged the cultural pressure to produce idealised, Instagram-worthy meals at home, instead encouraging audiences to embrace shortcuts, ease, and the simple pleasure of eating together.
Published in Sweden in July 2016, the campaign arrived at a moment when social media had begun reshaping the way people related to food and domestic life across the country. The household and home-living category had become a stage for performance rather than pleasure, and IKEA — a brand whose entire identity is built around making everyday life at home better — was positioned to address that tension directly. The campaign belongs to the House, Garden and lifestyle sector, grounding its message in IKEA's kitchen and home-living product range.
The campaign's driving creative insight, as documented by Acne Se, was that expectations kill inspiration. Rather than presenting cooking as a aspirational act, "Let's Relax" gave Swedish audiences explicit permission to stop treating mealtimes as competitive performances. The hero film, the campaign's single media asset, depicted the modern obsession with photographing food — framing it as an almost absurdist ritual, as though it were a behaviour lifted from a seventeenth-century tradition rather than a contemporary social habit, according to acne.se. This reframing gave the campaign its distinctive comic and cultural intelligence. Clapboard Score: 82/100.
In Sweden, where IKEA retains deep cultural relevance as a domestic brand, the campaign's tone carried particular weight. It spoke to a genuinely Swedish sensibility — understated, self-aware, resistant to excess — while addressing a pressure that had become universal across digital culture. Agency Acne, working from Stockholm, translated that insight into a single, confident film that prioritised human truth over product demonstration.
IKEA identified a specific cultural pressure reshaping domestic life in Sweden. Social media had elevated the home kitchen from a private, functional space into a public arena where meals were judged as much for their visual presentation as for their taste or the connection they created between people. This shift formed the strategic foundation for "Let's Relax."
The campaign's core strategic premise, as documented by acne.se and shots.net, was that the modern expectation of perfection — driven by platforms that reward curated, photogenic content — had drained the pleasure from everyday cooking. IKEA's insight was that its audience did not need more inspiration to cook impressive meals; they needed permission to cook imperfect, convenient ones. The tagline and campaign idea, as reported by acne.se, centred on the principle that expectations kill inspiration, repositioning IKEA's kitchen range not as a tool for culinary achievement but as a means of making relaxed, everyday home life easier.
In Sweden's highly competitive household and lifestyle retail environment, this positioning carried strategic distinction. Competitors such as Coop and Hemköp operate within the grocery and home-living space, typically reinforcing aspirational food culture through recipe-led communications. IKEA's decision to subvert that convention — using a film format rather than a catalogue aesthetic — marked a deliberate departure from category norms. As documented by shots.net, the campaign was handled entirely by Acne's Stockholm office, with Johan Holmgren and Morten Kjaer serving as creative directors, ensuring the strategic and creative voices remained unified. Head of planning Morten Lundholm shaped the consumer insight that underpinned the brief, according to shots.net, grounding the campaign in observed Swedish domestic behaviour rather than abstract brand positioning. The result was a strategy that felt culturally earned rather than imposed.
The creative execution of "Let's Relax" rests on a single film asset directed by Tompa and Rondo — the directing duo of Tomas Skoging and Filip Nilsson — produced through ACNE Production in Stockholm, Sweden.
The film's central creative device, as documented by acne.se, recontextualised the contemporary act of photographing food by presenting it as though it were an ancient or ceremonial ritual. This approach gave the work its satirical edge: by treating a mundane, smartphone-era behaviour with the visual grammar and solemnity of something far older, the film exposed the absurdity of food perfectionism without lecturing its audience. The humour was structural, embedded in the filmmaking itself rather than in dialogue or voiceover.
Director of photography Anders Jedenfors handled the visual execution, according to shots.net and acne.se, lending the film a crafted, cinematic quality that gave its comedic premise room to breathe. Creative directors Johan Holmgren and Morten Kjaer oversaw the work, with copywriter Markus Bjurman and art director Cecilia Dufils forming the core creative team, as documented by shots.net. Fredrik Preisler and Katie Copeland contributed to the broader creative effort, while producer Fredrik Skoglund and executive producer David Olsson managed the production, per shots.net and acne.se.
The decision to commit the campaign to a single film asset, rather than a multi-format content spread, reflects a creative confidence that is itself consistent with the campaign's message. "Let's Relax" did not over-engineer its delivery. It trusted one well-made piece of storytelling to carry the weight of the idea — a formal choice that mirrored the lifestyle and household product philosophy the brand was advocating. In the context of Swedish advertising in 2016, that restraint was a creative statement in its own right.
No verified performance data for "Let's Relax" is publicly available. No confirmed awards for this campaign appear across the Cannes Lions, Effies, One Show, D&AD, Clios, Webby, or WARC databases, based on publicly accessible records.
What the campaign's structure does demonstrate is a high degree of strategic coherence. The creative insight — that social media pressure had made cooking feel like a competitive performance — was both culturally specific to Sweden in 2016 and broadly resonant across markets where Instagram had become a shaping force in domestic life. The decision to address that pressure through satire, rather than sincerity, gave the film a tone that was harder to ignore and easier to share.
From a brand effectiveness standpoint, "Let's Relax" performed several functions simultaneously. It reasserted IKEA's position as a brand that understands how people actually live — not how they aspire to live — which is a consistent and durable element of IKEA's global communications identity. It also demonstrated category leadership in the Swedish household and lifestyle space by subverting the aspirational conventions that competitors in the sector typically relied upon.
The use of a single, high-quality film asset, as noted in campaign documentation on acne.se and shots.net, concentrated the creative investment in craft and storytelling rather than volume. This approach tends to produce work with longer cultural shelf life. A Clapboard editorial assessment awards "Let's Relax" a score of 82 out of 100, reflecting the campaign's creative discipline, strategic clarity, and the quality of its filmmaking craft relative to its category.
"Let's Relax" is a 2016 IKEA film campaign created by Stockholm ad agency Acne and published in Sweden in July 2016. It challenged the social media pressure to produce perfect, Instagram-worthy meals, encouraging audiences to embrace shortcuts and enjoy cooking and dining without performing for an audience, per acne.se.
Acne, the Stockholm-based ad agency, created "Let's Relax" for IKEA. Creative directors Johan Holmgren and Morten Kjaer led the work, with copywriter Markus Bjurman and art director Cecilia Dufils on the core creative team, as documented by shots.net and acne.se. The campaign was produced by ACNE Production.
The "Let's Relax" film was directed by Tompa and Rondo — the directing duo of Tomas Skoging and Filip Nilsson — through ACNE Production in Stockholm, Sweden. Director of photography Anders Jedenfors handled the visual execution, according to shots.net and acne.se. The film is the campaign's sole media asset.
The campaign's core creative insight was that expectations kill inspiration, as documented by acne.se. "Let's Relax" depicted the modern habit of photographing food as an absurdist ritual, exposing the pressure social media places on home cooking in Sweden and repositioning IKEA's kitchen range as a means of enabling easier, more relaxed everyday life.
No verified awards for "Let's Relax" are recorded across Cannes Lions, Effies, One Show, D&AD, Clios, Webby, or WARC databases based on publicly available records. A separate IKEA campaign, "Every Other Week" by Åkestam Holst, won One Show 2017 and Epica Awards 2016 honours, but those awards do not apply to this campaign.
"Let's Relax" received a Clapboard Score of 82 out of 100. This editorial assessment reflects the campaign's creative discipline, its culturally grounded strategic insight for the Swedish household and lifestyle market, and the quality of filmmaking craft delivered by directors Tompa and Rondo and cinematographer Anders Jedenfors.
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