I'd happily pay for the traditional physical IKEA yearly catalog. I suspect that if they sold it in-store for a few euros (€2?) just to cover printing costs, many people would buy it. It's more than a product list, it’s a cultural artifact, offering a window into the aesthetics, values, and lifestyle of its time. I still keep their old catalogs, and I’m not alone.
Fun fact - Getty Images used to send physical albums of their stock photo collections.
It was some 25 years ago, I was doing freelance for an ad agency, and while visiting the office and waiting for my appointment to finalize some paperwork I was browsing through these. When my guy finally showed up to pick me up he asked if I liked them and said - you can get these for free, just write them. So I did and they mailed me 10kg worth of albums. Just like that.
Just a cool memory from the past. Back then internet wasn't that rich, mobile phones were novelty, and when you visited a musuem or gallery and liked you bought a massive album to hold on to your memories.
These days, when visiting such places (think sistine chapel) I don't even bother to do pictures at all. If I want to recall something I can find endless stream of top quality pictures made by professionals with equipment worth as much as my car and in clinical settings, with no crowds and perfect lighting.
My university had bound catalogues of “letterpress blocks” you could order for letterpresses.
These were from about 50-100 years ago, and were great for scanning in and converting to vector art as various design elements. Usually these were artistic flourishes to include inline with text.
The one that stands out for me was engraved drawing of a fish that would not be out of place as a large print.
Not saying this is you, but I’m reminded of a story of a woman who took a ton of photos of vacations - all the sights. But upon the death of her husband realized she never captured the people with her
I mean obviously the color space of most images you find online is still RGB although that is slowly changing, but until it changes print versions will probably be higher quality.
The colors afforded by your phone or camera probably have richer colors than is afforded by images you download of the place online, but may also be dependent on what you're doing and your camera settings.
I've known about Ikea for just one-third of my life. It's only last few years that it has been in the country of my origin and only this year in my home city. I love the repository of design, aesthetics, technology, advertising, and sociology these catalogs can be. I'm sure you could write a book "titled design through the decades from an ikea lens".
It was one if not the most effective advertisement which I’ve encountered in my life. We got it freely every year with post, and I dreamed as a kid to have such houses and flats which could be seen in them. The brand stuck me so well, that it’s my go to furniture store, since I moved out from my parents. I wanted to read it again last year to have some ideas for my new flat, and I was devastated when I’ve figured out that it’s not printed anymore. Even as I’ve been continuously online for 24-25 years, a digital “version” of it will never be the same. I won’t ever read it just for fun, which we did back then so many times (my whole family), that it became utterly damaged until the next year’s edition came. I would easily pay for it.
I remember paging through the IKEA catalog and OTTO clothing catalog at my grandparents house in the summer. We were bored. I think this is just nostalgia. Today even if there was a print version, it wouldn't mean the same to people as it did back then. There's so much more stuff competing for your attention online all the time.
You could buy something via mail or phone, but there were also shops: you would go there, fill out a form with tiny pencils (like an old school bank form), give it to the clerk, and they'd bring it to the cashier 'from the back'.
I remember holiday catalogues the same. Then the internet came, and I assumed it would make the whole process of choosing a holiday that bit more magical
Instead we got really efficient price comparison and sometimes very useful but often gamed customer reviews...
> And behind the scenes, work on the next catalogue had already begun – a process lasting several months and involving planning, construction of interiors, photography and filming, all led by catalogue manager Mia Olsson Tunér.
It is naive to assume printing costs are the only costs involved.
I feel comfortable assuming IKEA had a better understanding of the economic fundamentals of the catalogue than HN commenters.
No one is assuming printing costs are the only costs to produce the catalogue. The point of pricing the catalogue at printing costs is to cover the marginal cost of offering the catalogue for sale. The fixed costs of producing the calendar are incurred either way.
There are other stuff that goes into it. But they still do nearly all of that for the web site, so a print catalogue in addition wouldn't be such a massive undertaking.
The problem really is the distribution costs, it used to be delivered to every home in Sweden, doing it on that scale is expensive. If they were satisfied with doing a print catalogue for the biggest fans, it would be an insignificant cost.
Woah...that brings back some memories. In a whole different timeline 22 years ago I was printing them for literal months. We did all European versions and it was 8 weeks of nothing but IKEA catalogs. They were highly optimized so for a language change we only had to switch the black cylinders. The whole IT was bonkers for the time we used SGI workstations for pre press and had like 100 bonded dial up connections for the mass of data. The pages came as TIF files and a catalogue was around 300GB. We were a rotogravure shop and did around 13m/s of 3-4 meters paper in width and around 4-5 kilometers in length. I think a whole run was 50 metric tons of paper. Good times but incredibly boring if the machine was dialed in.
And that they were set by linotype! Whenever I get annoyed at Jekyll or ruby or GitHub pages or whatever not building and needing maintenance, I think back and am suddenly grateful that my problem isn't of sorting funny shaped pieces of metal into exactly the right order.
A bit OT, but why is ikea internet store (any country) designed to be so unusable? Lists of available components hidden in pdfs tucked in obscure menu, no way to find compatible components, search flooded with tens of thousands of "combinations" — I mean, they obviously know what they are doing. What is the goal of making it such way?
Not to explain away Ikea's byzantine system, a difference in size usually comes with a difference in use and environment.
While a T-shirt has the same purpose in S M or L, a table isn't the same if it's lower smaller than 50cm or longer than 1.5m, or lower than 60cm or higher than 70cm. In a standard shop you'd call that a night stand, or a coffee table, or a kids' table or living room's low table etc.
If you think of it as shopping for an environment (same as half of the in-shop experience: they'll show you full rooms where you can see products fit together) it makes sense. Somewhat.
It's not super hard to back up (using the "bread crumbs" on the page you linked), to "Dressers & chests of drawers", pop down the "Series" input selector, and pick STORKLINTA. That gets you [1] which I hope shows all the dressers of that name.
IKEA likes to find ways to get you into their physical stores because they know you’re going to end up buying more than just the items you came for.
So they have a website that sort of teases you, but isn’t actually good enough to replace the physical stores.
You’ll start on the website, but get frustrated with it and eventually just drive over to IKEA to find the items you want. And you’ll also come home with some candles, picture frames, and a couple packs of frozen meatballs.
Also to note, shipping prices are egregious compared to the product prices. In most cases shipping a single product will cost 2 or 3 times more than the product price.
They made efforts during COVID so they're obviously aware of the issue, and I'm sure they al see it as lost opportunity, but probably still don't want to eat the cost or go full Amazon and have their own centers.
TBH as a customer I'm fine with keeping in-store price low instead of subsiding the online store.
> IKEA likes to find ways to get you into their physical stores because they know you’re going to end up buying more than just the items you came for.
If only they actually had a decent density of stores in the US. I live north of a major metro area (Boston) and I have to drive over 1.5 hours to an IKEA. I used to live in Raleigh, NC and the closest one was over 3.5 hours away.
Although maybe this is part of the strategy, getting you to travel a long distance to there stores in order to keep you there.
This is completely anectodal, but I have a friend who works there and he talks about a very change-averse culture.
He has to sit through talks about how Ikea is a bussiness that already works very well and the most important thing is to avoid any changes that have even a 0.001% chance of making it not work. Many relatively trivial deployments have to be approved by a lengthy international bureaucracy, with a focus on preventing any automation that can eventually result in workforce not being needed. Things like that.
I worked for a few years at a 100+ year old privately owned (same family) B2B supplier with insane profits. Website was outdated but highly practical, sales/CRM (if you can call it that) systems were mostly command line and hadn't changed fundamentally since the 1980s. These systems worked, and any proposal to change anything took months of meetings and debates and review of every cost/benefit possible. Proving that a change directly translated to a clear revenue metric was nearly impossible– for at least this niche, would more modern sales software actually translate to more orders? (answer: not really, a question reanalyzed every few years in depth). Would a nicer website get more conversions? (also no, something A/B tested to death every few years). Changing the position of one product grouping by a few pixels might be a 6 month job, lol.
By contrast, their fulfillment center was cutting edge, highly automated, and relatively experimental– if it improved the speed and cut costs, they jumped right on. These are much easier to measure as profitable.
While I don't shop that much at Ikea, I still remember their product lines, will sift through the dozens of combinations and PDFs, and take notes while looking at the building instructions to see what could be done with a product.
Most of us will choose Ikea for the flexibility, and will happily do some amount of research anyway.
Until reading your comment it didn't hit me that the site was so different from other brands, like Apple for instance. And I sure don't enjoy Apple's site. But then Ikea shops aren't traditional shops either, if sifting through pages of products isn't your thing, walking through sinuous paths all around the shop won't be either.
But how does it make sense in the case you describe to hide those pdfs on the site so deep you cannot find them except when told where to click (or by major accident)?
The 'Acquired' podcast episode on Ikea speculates that their "buy in person" was historically a cost advantage (especially over pre-assembled furniture that cost $$$ to deliver), as they didn't have to pay shipping/delivery. In the modern era of "expect free shipping as long as some minimum amount is spent", online sold and delivered sales have less profit margin, and one could imagine an intentional business decision to try and keep the in-person experience the "preferred" one for customers.
I bought some shelving a while back and just paid for delivery. There is a store within driving range, but at the time (and why I needed the items) was going through some things, it was just a day I didn't want to spend.
Certainly, Ikea organizes their stores in a way that probably encourages impulse purchases.
Trying to buy an Ikea pax: Some major but simple components I need to complete it are not available. I'd be happy to have everything delivered a month or two in the future, but no, I can't: Either I order now or I manually check back in the future.
Why is everything so shit? Isn't getting me to buy their pax with as many interior elements as possible how they make money?
They want you to come to a store, where they can exert immediate influence over you. In some sense it's a cult, more specifically a political cult, and they want you to spend as much time as possible in their environment. They are your family, it's where you go to eat, have someone else take care of your kid, relax and so on.
Ingvar Kamprad was a lifelong fascist, which heavily influences IKEA. Loyalty over competence, futurism over tradition, things like that.
I hadn't noticed the lack of printed IKEA catalogs until now. Seems like they stopped making them in 2021. They used to just appear in the mailbox. (I'm in Sweden. They were literally sent to every household in the country every year.)
I'm a fan of print layout catalogs over database driven web sites. Can't AI help with making an appealing paginated layout of a product database? I'd be happy with a 1 GB .pdf.
Edit: Shoutout to the electronics supplier Reichelt in Germany for keeping the catalog alive:
I don't think you need AI but you do need to think about the audience for the printed catalogue.
A few years ago I did the website for a retailer of clothes for the elderly, and they were doing it old school with the catalogue, printed order form and excellent customer service by phone. Their niche was the demographic every other clothing retailer avoided. Unless you have a similar niche, you have to ask about whether a printed catalogue is worthwhile.
AI could potentially help but how do you plan and budget time for that? It could take anything between two minutes and two years to get right. Meanwhile you could do it old-school with artworkers slaving away. Alternatively, you could automate the process to use print stylesheets where you specify the page size and then populate the content with CSS grid layout. The printed catalogue could then be created on demand (and cached) so that it automatically updates itself. This could be a manageable process that you could plan and budget for.
In your product database you could have fields for layout preferences so that you can specify the featured product for each page and what to downgrade in the presentation. I would say this is definitely viable and one reason this is not done is that any company still invested in print catalogues will have an artworker department and nobody in such a department would invest time into automating their job.
No need for AI --- I used to work up automated typesetting systems for a previous employer --- feed in the database as a properly tagged XML file, provide all the graphics in a folder, and a couple of typesetting runs later, one had a fully paginated PDF w/ ToC and Index.
The problem is, no one wants to pay for this since no value is seen in such a paginated view --- even if AI could create such a typesetting routine.
I mean, what I'm after is a page layout that is designed with compactness and readability in mind. Going from a product database to that requires quite a lot.
Crazy how few of their decades old designs look "wrong" today. Their combination of high quality design, low price, and (depending on price...) workable to good build quality is pretty unique.
Mind you, a lot of their designs are cheap knock-offs of contemporary designs.
* The POÄNG chair is a copy of Alvar Aalto's 406.
* Nakamura's earlier POEM copied both the 406 and a chair by Bruno Mathsson.
* FROSTA (now discontinued) is a copy of Aalto's Stool 60.
* KROMVIK copied Bruno Mathsson's Ulla bed frame.
* BORE copied Mathsson's Karin chair.
And so on. Ironically, some of these also have become classics of their own, or at least sought-after vintage objects.
IKEA sometimes comes up with original, sometimes novel designs, but generally they copy better designs with worse manufacturing quality rather than coming up with original ones.
And they are genuinely worse in terms of construction. For example, if you compare the wood quality of a FROSTA with Aalta's stool it's night and day. FROSTA is just plywood cut to size. The Aalto stool is solid birch, with a plywood top and an elegant solid birch veneer for the edge band, and the legs use a unique plywood-like join that is a thing of beauty [1].
Personally, I support any sort of cheap knock-offs as long as they more-or-less last for some time. "Alvar Aalto's 406"'s price is JP¥304,200 from what I quickly found. Most expensive POÄNG is ¥16,990. Almost 20x cheaper. Increasing QoL for average people who can't afford expensive things is actually good.
Yes, I understand the whole "copying isn't innovation" part of the argument, but it is for the greater good.
First off, stealing is not allowed. I don't know the finer details of intellectual property law, but if IKEA according to that would be stealing designs than that is not OK.
Second however, engineering products in such a way that you can bring down the price by 95% while quality/niceness/longevity only suffers (let's say) 25% is a thing to marvel at. Having 75% of a €265 design stool in your house for €25 is fantastic.
The more striking thing is checking them against each other.
The 1959 catalog had thin, svelte, curved and up angled designs. The Mid 80's had plump, puffy, overstuffed and was quite tame-loud, whereas the 2020's has "I'm not here, white-black-pop of color" aesthetics.
Nordic design has jumped the shark and the modern obsession with black and white is a tragedy. Homes look like mental asylums with their all white decor. For instance, I would love a nice dark brown walnut bookshelf like this one [1], but IKEA does not stock that color here at all.
This is awesome! I wish Omega, Zenith, Seiko and other watch manufacturers would do the same and publish their historic catalogs online! And auto manufacturers, and really everyone who is in the kind of business where catalogs like this exists.
* flipping through the pages I stopped with some interest on section for the "Optical Department" (page 84)
* I noticed the pince-nez glasses, and wondered "does pince-nez just mean 'pinch nose'?
* looked up pince-nez on Wikipedia[1], sure enough, pince-nez means "pinch nose".
* there is an interesting section in this article about early glasses [2]
* A citation in this section leads to "Renaissance vision from spectacles to telescopes," (p. 167) helpfully archived on the Internet Archive [3]
* paging through this book leads to a "fairly complete description of horn frame making in a Florentine carnival song of the early sixteenth century." [4] (p.171)
And finally, this "Florentine carnival song" has the following verse:
> Because they are made by
> necromantic artifice and the planets
> of Mercury, Jupiter and Mars,
> herbal juices and very secret,
> they make men wise
> when they use these spectacles.
I had no idea of the necromantic powers I was invoking by wearing glasses!
[2]:
> The earliest form of eyewear for which any archaeological record exists comes from the middle of the 15th century. It is a primitive pince-nez...
I was interested in when computers started showing up. I flipped through some years quickly. I see a terminal on page 158 in 1984 ('84:158). What looks like an 8-bit computer at '85:103 and a Mac at '86:190. Anyone see something earlier?
This could be a game. When was the first flat screen TV? When was the first CD rack? When was the first microwave?
There is a record player at '20:156. Did record players go away and then come back?
There are at least two typewriters in 2020 ('20:56 and '20:61). I wouldn't have expected typewriters in a 2020 catalog. Maybe that's a Swedish thing? Are typewriters still common in Sweden?
One thing to note is that the setting of a furniture catalog is meant to establish emotional connection to a setting which could cause you buy furniture.
Midcentury stuff like record players came back into vogue in the 2010s and 2020s; a typewriter would be one extension of such a retro fashion. Even today a vinyl is a common item in the merch shops of modern artists and bands. https://a.co/d/9FFBuEF
> the setting of a furniture catalog is meant to establish emotional connection to a setting which could cause you buy furniture
I think they do an excellent job of this in their stores. The mock rooms they have look so cozy and inviting. If they had a service where their designers would come to my home and help me replicate that vibe, I'd do it!
And when will be the last... Recently a webshop accidentally sent me my order of two fantastic jazz CD's twice and they did not want me to return them. I tried to offload them for free on anyone I know who vaguely likes jazz. None of them had a CD player, none of them wanted two CD's for free...
One of the things I like best when visiting friends, is to have a look at their bookcases and CD racks. But I think I won't be able to much longer.
There's a lot of interesting research one could do through the ikea lens given it has had such a huge impact on cultures (specially the youth) in the west for a good part of a century.
What a coincidence to see this on the HN front page. I want to use these catalogs for a project of mine, but I first wanted to speak to one of the people of the IKEA museum or IKEA itself to inquire about permissions (outside of the ones on the website). I have been trying to get a hold of them for weeks now, but with no luck so far. If anyone here knows someone at those places, please let me know.
Haha cheers. Despite this being a fun project, I'd still like to be the first to do it, so forgive me for not telling yet. I will try another round of outreach tomorrow and post it on HN as soon as I get permission.
Readit News
It was some 25 years ago, I was doing freelance for an ad agency, and while visiting the office and waiting for my appointment to finalize some paperwork I was browsing through these. When my guy finally showed up to pick me up he asked if I liked them and said - you can get these for free, just write them. So I did and they mailed me 10kg worth of albums. Just like that.
Just a cool memory from the past. Back then internet wasn't that rich, mobile phones were novelty, and when you visited a musuem or gallery and liked you bought a massive album to hold on to your memories.
These days, when visiting such places (think sistine chapel) I don't even bother to do pictures at all. If I want to recall something I can find endless stream of top quality pictures made by professionals with equipment worth as much as my car and in clinical settings, with no crowds and perfect lighting.
These were from about 50-100 years ago, and were great for scanning in and converting to vector art as various design elements. Usually these were artistic flourishes to include inline with text.
The one that stands out for me was engraved drawing of a fish that would not be out of place as a large print.
The colors afforded by your phone or camera probably have richer colors than is afforded by images you download of the place online, but may also be dependent on what you're doing and your camera settings.
In Canada it was Consumers Distributing (also Eaton's, Sears):
* 1992 catalog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTXbe9Mw17Q
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers_Distributing
* https://www.tvo.org/article/what-happened-to-consumers-distr...
You could buy something via mail or phone, but there were also shops: you would go there, fill out a form with tiny pencils (like an old school bank form), give it to the clerk, and they'd bring it to the cashier 'from the back'.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalog_merchant
Instead we got really efficient price comparison and sometimes very useful but often gamed customer reviews...
It is naive to assume printing costs are the only costs involved.
I feel comfortable assuming IKEA had a better understanding of the economic fundamentals of the catalogue than HN commenters.
The problem really is the distribution costs, it used to be delivered to every home in Sweden, doing it on that scale is expensive. If they were satisfied with doing a print catalogue for the biggest fans, it would be an insignificant cost.
For decades we used to have daily newspapers delivered to our doorstep, and the price was low enough that almost anyone could afford it.
What an ingenious solution; I bet very few people would notice that everything is written in black(1). "Good design is invisible" indeed !
(1) except some of the product line (Ivar, Lack, etc), but those are invariant in all languages.
e.g. this dresser is available in many sizes but you wouldn't know from the product page: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/storklinta-3-drawer-chest-white...
At best you can then search for "STORKLINTA" but the result list has the other sizes mixed with all sorts of other products such as beds: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/search/?q=STORKLINTA
While a T-shirt has the same purpose in S M or L, a table isn't the same if it's lower smaller than 50cm or longer than 1.5m, or lower than 60cm or higher than 70cm. In a standard shop you'd call that a night stand, or a coffee table, or a kids' table or living room's low table etc.
If you think of it as shopping for an environment (same as half of the in-shop experience: they'll show you full rooms where you can see products fit together) it makes sense. Somewhat.
[1]: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/cat/chests-of-drawers-10451/?filt...
So they have a website that sort of teases you, but isn’t actually good enough to replace the physical stores.
You’ll start on the website, but get frustrated with it and eventually just drive over to IKEA to find the items you want. And you’ll also come home with some candles, picture frames, and a couple packs of frozen meatballs.
They made efforts during COVID so they're obviously aware of the issue, and I'm sure they al see it as lost opportunity, but probably still don't want to eat the cost or go full Amazon and have their own centers.
TBH as a customer I'm fine with keeping in-store price low instead of subsiding the online store.
If only they actually had a decent density of stores in the US. I live north of a major metro area (Boston) and I have to drive over 1.5 hours to an IKEA. I used to live in Raleigh, NC and the closest one was over 3.5 hours away.
Although maybe this is part of the strategy, getting you to travel a long distance to there stores in order to keep you there.
He has to sit through talks about how Ikea is a bussiness that already works very well and the most important thing is to avoid any changes that have even a 0.001% chance of making it not work. Many relatively trivial deployments have to be approved by a lengthy international bureaucracy, with a focus on preventing any automation that can eventually result in workforce not being needed. Things like that.
I worked for a few years at a 100+ year old privately owned (same family) B2B supplier with insane profits. Website was outdated but highly practical, sales/CRM (if you can call it that) systems were mostly command line and hadn't changed fundamentally since the 1980s. These systems worked, and any proposal to change anything took months of meetings and debates and review of every cost/benefit possible. Proving that a change directly translated to a clear revenue metric was nearly impossible– for at least this niche, would more modern sales software actually translate to more orders? (answer: not really, a question reanalyzed every few years in depth). Would a nicer website get more conversions? (also no, something A/B tested to death every few years). Changing the position of one product grouping by a few pixels might be a 6 month job, lol.
By contrast, their fulfillment center was cutting edge, highly automated, and relatively experimental– if it improved the speed and cut costs, they jumped right on. These are much easier to measure as profitable.
While I don't shop that much at Ikea, I still remember their product lines, will sift through the dozens of combinations and PDFs, and take notes while looking at the building instructions to see what could be done with a product.
Most of us will choose Ikea for the flexibility, and will happily do some amount of research anyway.
Until reading your comment it didn't hit me that the site was so different from other brands, like Apple for instance. And I sure don't enjoy Apple's site. But then Ikea shops aren't traditional shops either, if sifting through pages of products isn't your thing, walking through sinuous paths all around the shop won't be either.
It's a fundamentally different public.
Certainly, Ikea organizes their stores in a way that probably encourages impulse purchases.
Why is everything so shit? Isn't getting me to buy their pax with as many interior elements as possible how they make money?
Ingvar Kamprad was a lifelong fascist, which heavily influences IKEA. Loyalty over competence, futurism over tradition, things like that.
I'm a fan of print layout catalogs over database driven web sites. Can't AI help with making an appealing paginated layout of a product database? I'd be happy with a 1 GB .pdf.
Edit: Shoutout to the electronics supplier Reichelt in Germany for keeping the catalog alive:
https://cdn-reichelt.de/katalog/01-2025/ (537 MB .pdf)
A few years ago I did the website for a retailer of clothes for the elderly, and they were doing it old school with the catalogue, printed order form and excellent customer service by phone. Their niche was the demographic every other clothing retailer avoided. Unless you have a similar niche, you have to ask about whether a printed catalogue is worthwhile.
AI could potentially help but how do you plan and budget time for that? It could take anything between two minutes and two years to get right. Meanwhile you could do it old-school with artworkers slaving away. Alternatively, you could automate the process to use print stylesheets where you specify the page size and then populate the content with CSS grid layout. The printed catalogue could then be created on demand (and cached) so that it automatically updates itself. This could be a manageable process that you could plan and budget for.
In your product database you could have fields for layout preferences so that you can specify the featured product for each page and what to downgrade in the presentation. I would say this is definitely viable and one reason this is not done is that any company still invested in print catalogues will have an artworker department and nobody in such a department would invest time into automating their job.
The problem is, no one wants to pay for this since no value is seen in such a paginated view --- even if AI could create such a typesetting routine.
An example:
https://archive.org/details/mouserelectronic00unse/page/190/...
* The POÄNG chair is a copy of Alvar Aalto's 406.
* Nakamura's earlier POEM copied both the 406 and a chair by Bruno Mathsson.
* FROSTA (now discontinued) is a copy of Aalto's Stool 60.
* KROMVIK copied Bruno Mathsson's Ulla bed frame.
* BORE copied Mathsson's Karin chair.
And so on. Ironically, some of these also have become classics of their own, or at least sought-after vintage objects.
IKEA sometimes comes up with original, sometimes novel designs, but generally they copy better designs with worse manufacturing quality rather than coming up with original ones.
And they are genuinely worse in terms of construction. For example, if you compare the wood quality of a FROSTA with Aalta's stool it's night and day. FROSTA is just plywood cut to size. The Aalto stool is solid birch, with a plywood top and an elegant solid birch veneer for the edge band, and the legs use a unique plywood-like join that is a thing of beauty [1].
[1] https://www.alvaraalto.fi/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/l-jalka...
Yes, I understand the whole "copying isn't innovation" part of the argument, but it is for the greater good.
A 406 costs ×20 more (£1600 vs £80).
Does the 406 have cleaner lines? Yes.
Is it comfier? The 406 doesn't have a cushioned seat so, maybe or maybe not.
Will it last longer? Probably. But the IKEA one comes with a 10 year warranty and unless you treat it badly it'll probably last far longer than that.
Hard to argue that the IKEA POÄNG isn't great value for the people who have other priorities.
Second however, engineering products in such a way that you can bring down the price by 95% while quality/niceness/longevity only suffers (let's say) 25% is a thing to marvel at. Having 75% of a €265 design stool in your house for €25 is fantastic.
It's solid wood, so it'll probably last another 40 years at least.
Deleted Comment
The 1959 catalog had thin, svelte, curved and up angled designs. The Mid 80's had plump, puffy, overstuffed and was quite tame-loud, whereas the 2020's has "I'm not here, white-black-pop of color" aesthetics.
[1] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/billy-bookcase-combination-brow...
https://archive.org/details/harrods-for-everything-images/mo...
* flipping through the pages I stopped with some interest on section for the "Optical Department" (page 84)
* I noticed the pince-nez glasses, and wondered "does pince-nez just mean 'pinch nose'?
* looked up pince-nez on Wikipedia[1], sure enough, pince-nez means "pinch nose".
* there is an interesting section in this article about early glasses [2]
* A citation in this section leads to "Renaissance vision from spectacles to telescopes," (p. 167) helpfully archived on the Internet Archive [3]
* paging through this book leads to a "fairly complete description of horn frame making in a Florentine carnival song of the early sixteenth century." [4] (p.171)
And finally, this "Florentine carnival song" has the following verse:
> Because they are made by
> necromantic artifice and the planets > of Mercury, Jupiter and Mars,
> herbal juices and very secret,
> they make men wise
> when they use these spectacles.
I had no idea of the necromantic powers I was invoking by wearing glasses!
Thanks for the fun diversion!
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[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pince-nez
[2]: > The earliest form of eyewear for which any archaeological record exists comes from the middle of the 15th century. It is a primitive pince-nez...
[3]: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_peIL7hVQUmwC/page/n167/mo...
[4]: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_peIL7hVQUmwC/page/n171/mo...
This could be a game. When was the first flat screen TV? When was the first CD rack? When was the first microwave?
There is a record player at '20:156. Did record players go away and then come back?
There are at least two typewriters in 2020 ('20:56 and '20:61). I wouldn't have expected typewriters in a 2020 catalog. Maybe that's a Swedish thing? Are typewriters still common in Sweden?
Midcentury stuff like record players came back into vogue in the 2010s and 2020s; a typewriter would be one extension of such a retro fashion. Even today a vinyl is a common item in the merch shops of modern artists and bands. https://a.co/d/9FFBuEF
I think they do an excellent job of this in their stores. The mock rooms they have look so cozy and inviting. If they had a service where their designers would come to my home and help me replicate that vibe, I'd do it!
And when will be the last... Recently a webshop accidentally sent me my order of two fantastic jazz CD's twice and they did not want me to return them. I tried to offload them for free on anyone I know who vaguely likes jazz. None of them had a CD player, none of them wanted two CD's for free...
One of the things I like best when visiting friends, is to have a look at their bookcases and CD racks. But I think I won't be able to much longer.
(I am obviously not the ikea museum, sorry - but what's your project?)