These Ikea essential boxes make moving into your college dorm instant-ramen-level easy
Ikea designed five ready-to-go boxes to make college move-in day easy.
Moving into a new college dorm is a notoriously stressful process.
Arriving in a new place, meeting a new roommate, hauling boxes up several flights of stairs (often with bedraggled parents in tow)—dorm move-in day can be an emotionally and physically draining part of starting a new life chapter. And if you forget a dorm essential, like a shower caddy, and have to face the communal bathroom while juggling all of your products under one arm? That’s the cherry on top of a rough few hours.
To help new college students make it through move-in day without too many crises, Ikea just launched five new starter boxes that bundle the key supplies for setting up a new dorm or apartment. The Ikea essential boxes are all under $100, and each comes tailored to a specific scenario: there’s one for dorm essentials, one full of Ikea snacks, a utility box with basic supplies, a bed and bath kit, and a cooking box for serving and eating meals (or, let’s face it, ramen noodles). All of the boxes are 15 percent cheaper than buying the individual items separately.
“There are a lot of decisions students face when planning and heading away from home for college,” Paul Anderson, commercial activities and events leader at Ikea U.S., wrote in an email to Fast Company. “The Starter Boxes were designed to make it easy for students who don’t have the time to shop for all the essentials needed to make their new home away from home function smoothly.”
For first-time dorm dwellers, the Dorm Essential Starter Box could save quite a few headaches. It comes with 22 different supplies, including cleaning materials, a shower caddy, towels, bedding, and plates. At $99.99, it’s a solid deal for its contents, and for the potentially multi-hour shopping trip that it eliminates.
However, the Bed & Bath Starter Box and the Cooking & Eating Starter Box would better serve someone moving to a new apartment than a campus residence hall. Most people using a communal bathroom won’t have any need for a personal shower curtain, toilet brush, or bath mat. And colleges are generally pretty strict about prohibiting any personal heating appliances, so unless you plan to get really creative, a full cookware set, knives, and pizza-making tools will also just fill up unnecessary space in your closet—and probably raise some eyebrows.
The Utility Starter Box comprises several basic handy items, like a power strip and a wireless charger (weirdly, it also comes with a toilet brush). There’s a bit of overlap with the contents of the Dorm Essential box, so students should avoid buying both. Finally, while the Study Snack Starter Box doesn’t contain any essentials, a few bags of Swedish gummies and chocolate bars might provide brownie points with new friends.
The true test of a successful move-in comes down to making the fewest emergency Target trips possible. And although these “essentials” boxes don’t have everything a new college student will need, they might whittle that number of journeys down—or prevent a humiliating late-night call to the RA.
(15)
