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.
Not just online. My nieces have at least 100x more physical toys than we had with my brother. I saw similar things with all of my friends with kids. Way more toys. Even in those families who are strongly anti consumerists.
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.
A company I worked for stopped doing physical catalogs too - after having done so for a very long time. The cost to produce the catalog was insane, and had quite a bit of dedicated staff working on it full-time. Making a catalog is a specialized skillset, and has little overlap with the business' core competencies, such as website administration.
Over time, the revenue attributed with the physical catalog declined year over year. People said they wanted the catalog, but it didn't translate into attributable sales. The ones that did order from the catalog were often the smallest, insignificant orders the company took in. The website and online advertising are where customers gravitated towards, and remain today.
The amount of people that actually want a physical catalog, even for IKEA, I would wager pales in comparison to the amonut of people that want to browse the catalog on their phone or tablet. Pricing changes, stock comes and goes, products get discontinued, colors/materials are changed, etc. The website is always up-to-date, the physical catalog... is not.
When I read comments like yours, I interpret them as people wanting nastolgic items more than marketing materials or ordering guides. The costs for the company are just too high to produce those anymore; well over $2 per catalog someone up-thread mentioned - we're talking more like $10-$20+ these days (not accounting for anything except print costs) for a full-color, glossy/professional catalog with hundreds of pages.
I have serious doubts IKEA printing catalogs today would garner any new business. They would give away (or perhaps sell) some copies to existing, long-time customers with a fond memory of the brand and their catalogs - and I'm afraid that's it.
I suppose on the plus side, my mailbox doesn't get completely stuffed with catalogs before Christmas every year. That aside, I do sort of miss leafing through all the catalogs I used to get.
Same way as IKEA restaurants were serving decent quality food for dimes.
It was business decision. People were thinking - we have a day off, we could go there and there, do some shopping, and then we go there for food, or we could go to the IKEA and eat there.
If you're "slave to the IKEA" and want to cherish your free day with consumerism, it was a no brainer if you wanted to shop on a budget and eat for free.
Unforntuantely, catalogues are gone and so are days of cheap food in IKEA.
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.
I agree that for tables there can be a difference in use but when IKEA has a dresser series named "HEMNES bedroom series" then that argument kind of goes out of the window.
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.
Please look at it quickly and try understanding what elements are available.
Or, say, Platsa having half of the pieces called Småstad, because they kinda would also fit in kid's room. Or trying to find codenames for doors/facades/drawers of Metod or Pax.
I didn't see the filter because it is only shown for wide windows (over 1250px wide) or when clicking the "All filters" button and is then at the bottom of the list.
The list even isn't sorted and looks like a SELECT without order from a database.
It is really odd they don't have a (sub) category page for each of the series.
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.
Shipping has always been a strong point for Ikea. Just look at how efficient most of their stuff is packaged, usually into very neat rectangular packages. They can fit a ton of stuff into a small volume, which improves shipping cost a lot. Last mile will always be relatively expensive, but shipping a truck load or a 40ft shipping container is relatively cheap. In the end it all comes down to cost per unit of volume, compared to the raw product cost per volume. A dense product will not nearly be affected by high shipping prices as much, and due to Ikea being insanely good at packaging, I expect they are outcompeting the rest of the market at this game by a decent margin.
Ah yes my very recent experience. We fully redid kitchen and went for Ikea (forsbacka oak, actually decently looking stuff, we will see about longevity). Our kitchen is very restricted, its on all 4 walls and everything needs to fit exactly, plus we have slanted roof on one side, making fitting a rather complex exercise.
So I bought bosch laser meter to be sure I don't mess up planning in their online planning software. We even asked Ikea to send a company that usually builds entire kitchen for them (aka their local partners), just to come for measuring and confirm my numbers (especially the angle of that roof, defines how tall and wide cabinets can fit underneath). It took forever, and the person doing measurements f*cked up badly, adding 30cm width to the place under the roof by mistake. He was re-measuring it but came with same number. I was suspicious of such a huge difference and luckily found his mistake, reverting back to my numbers (so we just wasted 1 month waiting for this company, even ignoring the fee).
Anyway, even with all their planning, in-person consultation, they messed up delivery and few items were missing, and they added few unnecessary items. Since delivery consists of 80+ brown boxes of all sizes that are just dumped on you, there is no way to find any mismatch out before building the actual kitchen. A lot of "fun" around that, I burned some vacation from this year on just chasing their mistakes.
Coming back to original topic - plinths or whatever goes under bottom cabinets to cover the gaping hole where legs are, were insufficient so we now have 0.5m hole there, waiting for item delivery while workers are long gone. Nothing is immediately available for pickup here, so waiting few weeks on piece of plastic weighting 1kg, 2.4m long, that costs cca 30$. Delivery - 100$, no way to even get it delivered to their shop, it needs to be a home delivery.
This is Switzerland, one would expect a bit better service in 2025 for their visibly elevated prices compared to EU all around. I did order the item in French Ikea instead, delivery was 'only' 40$. Not much competition for that price point here, but stellar quality service it certainly wasn't.
> 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.
I actually needed a couple of closet accessories after some renovation and IKEA seemed to make the most sense. I could have driven to the Boston-area IKEA but it was a pretty hectic time and, while I could have made a day-long expedition out of the process, at the end of the day, it just made more sense to pay them $60 or whatever to deliver what I needed to assemble and use.
And, yes, I would probably have bought some other things had I gone to the store.
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)?
I'm kinda lost, in another comment you mention the Eket system, so if it's those components you're looking for there's a full page for them liked right at the top of the Eket page:
If we're talking about the "Product details" -> "Assembly and documents" part, that's 3 clicks away and looks pretty straightforward to me. You make it sound like it's 15 levels of links inside the privacy policy.
that contain all information about series in compact, easy to understand form. Try finding that pdf on their site. Now imagine chances of finding it for someone who is not aware it exists. All it would take Ikea is adding one more pdf to the "Assembly and documents" section, so why hide these so much?
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.
As a design enthusiast, they're not in the same league, regardless of construction quality. There's a beauty in the original designs (like Alvar Aalto's) that's completely missed by copycats.
Design objects are vastly, ridiculously overpriced, but to me that's unrelated to the issue of design. An Aalto chair might not be "worth" $2,000, but if you buy the $200 IKEA version you won't have the same chair, so it's not a direct comparison. That's like saying why go to Hawaii when there's Belgium?
Chances are, when I buy the $200 IKEA chair, I have no idea about the chairs that inspired it. I buy it because I like it and can afford it. It doesn't particularly bother me that there is a nicer version of it out there for more money. In fact, I'd be surprised if there wasn't!
The beauty you see in the chair will not be noticed by people who are not design enthusiasts. It’s comfy, looks decent, and functional enough for people to make a purchase.
My point was, we should encourage copycats if it will reduce the price point even if it brings 80% of the joy to the buyer, compared to owning the designer chair, which is not attainable for them.
Ironically it's the prevalence of this chair in student residences that makes me never want to see one again. It's practically standard issue student furniture in many parts of Europe, I promised myself once I had a job that paid a reasonable salary I would never have one again, having sat in hundreds of the things during my education.
When I look back through photos of my student years, Poängs are in so, so many of the pictures. The chair itself is arguably relatively unoffensive; I just find its prevalence deeply boring.
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.
In a sense. But their designs are fairly timeless, and while their cheapest product lines don't hold up to much abuse they still last 10+ years under normal use. A fraction of what good furniture will last, but long enough that usually your needs change faster than the furniture breaks. Or longer, judging by the very healthy market for second-hand ikea furniture
Or until it gets scrapped because it went out of fashion. People usually don't renovate because their furnishings are falling apart but because they want something fresh.
I tend to agree. Styles change, needs change as people move and/or change lifestyles. I have some pretty old furniture but I mostly own it because I can find a space for it--not because I'd buy it today.
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.
Hej! My bad, I thought there was a way to message in HN. I don’t have social media so I leave you a name here: Sofia Lögdberg is the Archive and Collection manager. Good luck. Love to see what you have done.
One of these catalogs is connected to an interesting story that happened to me not long ago. The situation took place in Poland. I recently visited a friend’s house, and there my attention was caught by an old chest of drawers that must have been made during the communist era (the PRL period). I asked my friend if he knew what model it was, since there weren’t many such pieces made in those days — there are catalogs and auctions, so these things must be documented somewhere. He told me that he had already searched for it online but couldn’t find anything.
Out of curiosity, we moved the chest of drawers and looked behind it. There we found a small label with a production date (probably 1963) and the name of one of the Polish state-owned furniture factories. There was also the model name – quite enigmatic – and when I searched for it online, nothing came up.
The mystery intrigued me so much that I spent several hours going through old PRL-era catalogs and online auctions. After quite some time, I finally came across a photo on an auction site where someone was selling a similar piece – another item from the same furniture set. The description was very detailed; the seller even claimed it was a unique piece and included an extensive history of these furniture items.
It turned out that they were designed by Marian Grabiński, and the set was originally a wedding gift for Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA. Kamprad liked the gift so much that the furniture went into mass production – but only in Sweden. They were never available in Poland!
The auction also included scans from one of the old IKEA catalogs from 1964 (pages 111–114, see thread link). But how did these pieces end up in Poland? I don’t know if the Polish company actually produced them for IKEA, but according to the description, at least prototype series was made in Poland and distributed among some communist party officials in limited number. This was never available to buy in Poland.
As I later found out from my friend – his aunt actually was a communist party member and even held a fairly high position there so it made perfect sense.
The thing that has always driven me crazy about these catalogs is that I have an Ikea product that for the life of me I've never been able to find any reference to. So much so that I wouldn't even trust my memory if I didn't have an unopened set from 2002. It's called the GRILLBY, is a design by Gillis Lundgren, and it's a wire mesh wall mount kit for TRYGGVE shelves with hooks screwed into them.
I thought they looked like the bees knees when I saw them in the store, and the price must have been right because I bought a ton of them. I've been able to cover my walls with shelving ever since, but they must have come from the twilight zone. I've always wondered if the price was right because they were being discontinued and cleared out, but I can't find out when they were continued in the first place.
I'd be happy to hear if anyone has ever heard of anything like that.
LACK is from 1979 according to IKEA but the first one I could actually find (purely out of curiosity) is in the 1981 catalog on page 68 (in 5 colors). It is also on the front cover.
Love how the 2004 catalogue captures that iMac G3 colour scheme and vibe (even though, by then, you'd already gotten the more iPod looking G4).
When we try to remember how the design of a year "looks", it's surprisingly hard to document everything you were exposed to. I've been trying to find this particular graphics card demo animations I'd seen in computer stores in Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I remember being induced into a right proper trance by some of them but I don't remember enough detail to find out what it was.
Scrolling through that page feels like an incredible speedrun of design history. You can literally see the decades fly by — the photography, layouts, and even the fonts slowly evolving until suddenly, around 2006, it all starts to feel “modern.”
I’m 37, and that’s exactly the point where it clicks for me — when things stop looking “old” and start looking like the world I remember stepping into as an adult. It’s fascinating how our personal timelines sync up with broader shifts in design trends.
These are amazing! I checked a few that around the era of some of my favourite TV shows, and I can totally see the "vibe" reflected in a couple of cases.
Also, as someone who enjoys to draw/paint, these are a great source of references!
I was 13, delivering advertisement to mailboxes (basically a newspaper boy, but delivering to every mailbox).
Most weeks it was one bag for my route. Except when the ikea catalogue arrived… I went back and forth and back and forth — that thing was thick and heavy!
Was IKEA furniture always self-assembled for the entire time? The catalogues are wonderful for how fashion changed, but I’d love to see the evolution of user-facing design in terms of simple, explained engineering.
I feel like in the past, the furnitures have more color and soul and just furniture itself is enough to decorate homes, while newer furnitures are usually white and you need smaller and colorful things and more stuff to complete it - otherwise feels bland.
I'm by no means an interior designer, but my sense is that 60s/70s European design is pretty timeless. Especially if you take out the boldest colors, plastic-sheathed couches, and the like.
My sense is that modern furniture has generally fairly simple lines--and, from what I understand--younger generations tend to favor neutral color tones. While my house is relatively muted, it isn't the greyscale that I see among some younger folks.
Good housekeeping wrote as recently as 2023 that ikea kitchen cabinets used dovetail joinery.[1] But this runs counter to my and everyone I know's experience. Not sure how/why they could write that.
Every single Ikea kitchen furniture unit I've worked with has been flat pack, made of chipboard and assembled with these bolts that attach to a sort of a worm screw (edit: cam dowel lock nut), and some dowels, maybe a few screws. Not a single sheet of real wood or plywood, no dovetail or finger joints.
The only reason they wouldn't sell a drawer with a box joint today is because they wouldn't be able make the box flat enough. They certainly use even more complex joints even today.
one must be very pissed to degrade a comment which lines out explicitly wrongly driven design which never took off (it would be existing today!), which looks and feels cold, which gives a feeling of loneliness, handing over some nice "hey-it-looks-good"
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.
Not just online. My nieces have at least 100x more physical toys than we had with my brother. I saw similar things with all of my friends with kids. Way more toys. Even in those families who are strongly anti consumerists.
As a kid in the UK, Argos catalogues were magical.
> As a kid in the UK, Argos catalogues were magical.
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
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...
"The laminated book of dreams!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggOa9aSG-Ow
> 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.
A company I worked for stopped doing physical catalogs too - after having done so for a very long time. The cost to produce the catalog was insane, and had quite a bit of dedicated staff working on it full-time. Making a catalog is a specialized skillset, and has little overlap with the business' core competencies, such as website administration.
Over time, the revenue attributed with the physical catalog declined year over year. People said they wanted the catalog, but it didn't translate into attributable sales. The ones that did order from the catalog were often the smallest, insignificant orders the company took in. The website and online advertising are where customers gravitated towards, and remain today.
The amount of people that actually want a physical catalog, even for IKEA, I would wager pales in comparison to the amonut of people that want to browse the catalog on their phone or tablet. Pricing changes, stock comes and goes, products get discontinued, colors/materials are changed, etc. The website is always up-to-date, the physical catalog... is not.
When I read comments like yours, I interpret them as people wanting nastolgic items more than marketing materials or ordering guides. The costs for the company are just too high to produce those anymore; well over $2 per catalog someone up-thread mentioned - we're talking more like $10-$20+ these days (not accounting for anything except print costs) for a full-color, glossy/professional catalog with hundreds of pages.
I have serious doubts IKEA printing catalogs today would garner any new business. They would give away (or perhaps sell) some copies to existing, long-time customers with a fond memory of the brand and their catalogs - and I'm afraid that's it.
I suppose on the plus side, my mailbox doesn't get completely stuffed with catalogs before Christmas every year. That aside, I do sort of miss leafing through all the catalogs I used to get.
Same way as IKEA restaurants were serving decent quality food for dimes.
It was business decision. People were thinking - we have a day off, we could go there and there, do some shopping, and then we go there for food, or we could go to the IKEA and eat there.
If you're "slave to the IKEA" and want to cherish your free day with consumerism, it was a no brainer if you wanted to shop on a budget and eat for free.
Unforntuantely, catalogues are gone and so are days of cheap food in IKEA.
> Unforntuantely, catalogues are gone and so are days of cheap food in IKEA.
Depends on where you are. my Ikea still has all the cheap food you and I remember. Could be something stateside (if you are there).
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.
I don't think most people appreciate the miracle that is paper publishing.
For decades we used to have daily newspapers delivered to our doorstep, and the price was low enough that almost anyone could afford it.
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.
I still regularly receive printed papers at my (building's) doorstep; they are printed in color, and completely dedicated to ads.
> They were highly optimized so for a language change we only had to switch the black cylinders.
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.
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?
Also: why can't they show all sizes of a product jusst like when choosing t-shirt size on a normal shop?
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
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.
I agree that for tables there can be a difference in use but when IKEA has a dresser series named "HEMNES bedroom series" then that argument kind of goes out of the window.
But then "Hemnes bedroom series" also has beds in it...it sounds like the focus is as much on "bedroom" than "Hemnes"
https://www.ikea.com/jp/en/cat/hemnes-bedroom-series-58619/
And the other Hemnes lines include book stands, dish cabinets, TV stands.
I totally agree IKEA doesn't give a damn about series and collection consistency.
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.
[1]: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/cat/chests-of-drawers-10451/?filt...
Here is a page for Eket collection: https://www.ikea.lv/lv/collections/eket
Please look at it quickly and try understanding what elements are available.
Or, say, Platsa having half of the pieces called Småstad, because they kinda would also fit in kid's room. Or trying to find codenames for doors/facades/drawers of Metod or Pax.
I didn't see the filter because it is only shown for wide windows (over 1250px wide) or when clicking the "All filters" button and is then at the bottom of the list.
The list even isn't sorted and looks like a SELECT without order from a database.
It is really odd they don't have a (sub) category page for each of the series.
They do have category pages but the discoverability is abysmal. https://www.ikea.com/us/en/cat/storklinta-series-700569/
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.
Shipping has always been a strong point for Ikea. Just look at how efficient most of their stuff is packaged, usually into very neat rectangular packages. They can fit a ton of stuff into a small volume, which improves shipping cost a lot. Last mile will always be relatively expensive, but shipping a truck load or a 40ft shipping container is relatively cheap. In the end it all comes down to cost per unit of volume, compared to the raw product cost per volume. A dense product will not nearly be affected by high shipping prices as much, and due to Ikea being insanely good at packaging, I expect they are outcompeting the rest of the market at this game by a decent margin.
Ah yes my very recent experience. We fully redid kitchen and went for Ikea (forsbacka oak, actually decently looking stuff, we will see about longevity). Our kitchen is very restricted, its on all 4 walls and everything needs to fit exactly, plus we have slanted roof on one side, making fitting a rather complex exercise.
So I bought bosch laser meter to be sure I don't mess up planning in their online planning software. We even asked Ikea to send a company that usually builds entire kitchen for them (aka their local partners), just to come for measuring and confirm my numbers (especially the angle of that roof, defines how tall and wide cabinets can fit underneath). It took forever, and the person doing measurements f*cked up badly, adding 30cm width to the place under the roof by mistake. He was re-measuring it but came with same number. I was suspicious of such a huge difference and luckily found his mistake, reverting back to my numbers (so we just wasted 1 month waiting for this company, even ignoring the fee).
Anyway, even with all their planning, in-person consultation, they messed up delivery and few items were missing, and they added few unnecessary items. Since delivery consists of 80+ brown boxes of all sizes that are just dumped on you, there is no way to find any mismatch out before building the actual kitchen. A lot of "fun" around that, I burned some vacation from this year on just chasing their mistakes.
Coming back to original topic - plinths or whatever goes under bottom cabinets to cover the gaping hole where legs are, were insufficient so we now have 0.5m hole there, waiting for item delivery while workers are long gone. Nothing is immediately available for pickup here, so waiting few weeks on piece of plastic weighting 1kg, 2.4m long, that costs cca 30$. Delivery - 100$, no way to even get it delivered to their shop, it needs to be a home delivery.
This is Switzerland, one would expect a bit better service in 2025 for their visibly elevated prices compared to EU all around. I did order the item in French Ikea instead, delivery was 'only' 40$. Not much competition for that price point here, but stellar quality service it certainly wasn't.
/rant
> 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.
I actually needed a couple of closet accessories after some renovation and IKEA seemed to make the most sense. I could have driven to the Boston-area IKEA but it was a pretty hectic time and, while I could have made a day-long expedition out of the process, at the end of the day, it just made more sense to pay them $60 or whatever to deliver what I needed to assemble and use.
And, yes, I would probably have bought some other things had I gone to the store.
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.
Yep, this is it. I've heard similar.
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.
I'm probably part of that problem.
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.
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)?
I'm kinda lost, in another comment you mention the Eket system, so if it's those components you're looking for there's a full page for them liked right at the top of the Eket page:
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/cat/eket-inserts-accessories-5928...
If we're talking about the "Product details" -> "Assembly and documents" part, that's 3 clicks away and looks pretty straightforward to me. You make it sound like it's 15 levels of links inside the privacy policy.
Sorry for confusion. I am talking about documents like this: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/files/pdf/26/84/268411e4/eket_oct...
that contain all information about series in compact, easy to understand form. Try finding that pdf on their site. Now imagine chances of finding it for someone who is not aware it exists. All it would take Ikea is adding one more pdf to the "Assembly and documents" section, so why hide these so much?
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:
https://cdn-reichelt.de/katalog/01-2025/ (537 MB .pdf)
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.
Paginated view is stable. Scrollable is not. This hinders spatial memory immensely, but goes unnoticed.
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.
An example:
https://archive.org/details/mouserelectronic00unse/page/190/...
A printed catalog also provides discovery that no website has ever matched.
Exactly. So, my hope is that AI can rebuild this lost art that is now deemed too expensive.
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].
[1] https://www.alvaraalto.fi/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/l-jalka...
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.
As a design enthusiast, they're not in the same league, regardless of construction quality. There's a beauty in the original designs (like Alvar Aalto's) that's completely missed by copycats.
Design objects are vastly, ridiculously overpriced, but to me that's unrelated to the issue of design. An Aalto chair might not be "worth" $2,000, but if you buy the $200 IKEA version you won't have the same chair, so it's not a direct comparison. That's like saying why go to Hawaii when there's Belgium?
Chances are, when I buy the $200 IKEA chair, I have no idea about the chairs that inspired it. I buy it because I like it and can afford it. It doesn't particularly bother me that there is a nicer version of it out there for more money. In fact, I'd be surprised if there wasn't!
The beauty you see in the chair will not be noticed by people who are not design enthusiasts. It’s comfy, looks decent, and functional enough for people to make a purchase.
My point was, we should encourage copycats if it will reduce the price point even if it brings 80% of the joy to the buyer, compared to owning the designer chair, which is not attainable for them.
> they are genuinely worse in terms of construction
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.
Well said. My Poäng has been abused (by students) for years. It's still almost as good as new. And so very, very comfortable.
Ironically it's the prevalence of this chair in student residences that makes me never want to see one again. It's practically standard issue student furniture in many parts of Europe, I promised myself once I had a job that paid a reasonable salary I would never have one again, having sat in hundreds of the things during my education.
When I look back through photos of my student years, Poängs are in so, so many of the pictures. The chair itself is arguably relatively unoffensive; I just find its prevalence deeply boring.
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 IKEA innovation is fast fashion for furniture.
In a sense. But their designs are fairly timeless, and while their cheapest product lines don't hold up to much abuse they still last 10+ years under normal use. A fraction of what good furniture will last, but long enough that usually your needs change faster than the furniture breaks. Or longer, judging by the very healthy market for second-hand ikea furniture
> A fraction of what good furniture will last,
Good furniture lasts hundreds of years!
Or until it gets scrapped because it went out of fashion. People usually don't renovate because their furnishings are falling apart but because they want something fresh.
Does it really matter if people don't want to buy old furniture?
I tend to agree. Styles change, needs change as people move and/or change lifestyles. I have some pretty old furniture but I mostly own it because I can find a space for it--not because I'd buy it today.
I just renovated an Ikea table from 1980-something. Actually found it in the catalog too.
It's solid wood, so it'll probably last another 40 years at least.
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.
[1] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/billy-bookcase-combination-brow...
What colors are available for you?
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.
I came upon the Harrods 1912 catalog. Its interesting browse the catalog for what was available back then.
https://archive.org/details/harrods-for-everything-images/mo...
This led me down a pleasing rabbit hole:
* 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!
---
[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...
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!
> When was the first CD rack?
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.
In this age of extreme AI scraping, and an actual need for fun, whimsical projects built around IKEA catalogs, I give you permission.
(I am obviously not the ikea museum, sorry - but what's your project?)
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.
DM me!
I'd love to, but your profile gives no way to contact you? You can find one on mine, otherwise I'd be happy about a link.
Hej! My bad, I thought there was a way to message in HN. I don’t have social media so I leave you a name here: Sofia Lögdberg is the Archive and Collection manager. Good luck. Love to see what you have done.
Hej, thanks again. I'll try contacting her.
I recall being told the IKEA catalogue is the only publication ever to surpass the Bible in terms of annual print run (200 million at its peak)
One of these catalogs is connected to an interesting story that happened to me not long ago. The situation took place in Poland. I recently visited a friend’s house, and there my attention was caught by an old chest of drawers that must have been made during the communist era (the PRL period). I asked my friend if he knew what model it was, since there weren’t many such pieces made in those days — there are catalogs and auctions, so these things must be documented somewhere. He told me that he had already searched for it online but couldn’t find anything.
Out of curiosity, we moved the chest of drawers and looked behind it. There we found a small label with a production date (probably 1963) and the name of one of the Polish state-owned furniture factories. There was also the model name – quite enigmatic – and when I searched for it online, nothing came up.
The mystery intrigued me so much that I spent several hours going through old PRL-era catalogs and online auctions. After quite some time, I finally came across a photo on an auction site where someone was selling a similar piece – another item from the same furniture set. The description was very detailed; the seller even claimed it was a unique piece and included an extensive history of these furniture items.
It turned out that they were designed by Marian Grabiński, and the set was originally a wedding gift for Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA. Kamprad liked the gift so much that the furniture went into mass production – but only in Sweden. They were never available in Poland!
The auction also included scans from one of the old IKEA catalogs from 1964 (pages 111–114, see thread link). But how did these pieces end up in Poland? I don’t know if the Polish company actually produced them for IKEA, but according to the description, at least prototype series was made in Poland and distributed among some communist party officials in limited number. This was never available to buy in Poland.
As I later found out from my friend – his aunt actually was a communist party member and even held a fairly high position there so it made perfect sense.
Poland was a core manufacturing hub for IKEA for much of the 1960s, after Swedish manufacturers started to boycott them: https://ikeamuseum.com/en/explore/the-story-of-ikea/czesc-po...
The thing that has always driven me crazy about these catalogs is that I have an Ikea product that for the life of me I've never been able to find any reference to. So much so that I wouldn't even trust my memory if I didn't have an unopened set from 2002. It's called the GRILLBY, is a design by Gillis Lundgren, and it's a wire mesh wall mount kit for TRYGGVE shelves with hooks screwed into them.
I thought they looked like the bees knees when I saw them in the store, and the price must have been right because I bought a ton of them. I've been able to cover my walls with shelving ever since, but they must have come from the twilight zone. I've always wondered if the price was right because they were being discontinued and cleared out, but I can't find out when they were continued in the first place.
I'd be happy to hear if anyone has ever heard of anything like that.
Do you think the system might have been called Algot?
LACK is from 1979 according to IKEA but the first one I could actually find (purely out of curiosity) is in the 1981 catalog on page 68 (in 5 colors). It is also on the front cover.
Love how the 2004 catalogue captures that iMac G3 colour scheme and vibe (even though, by then, you'd already gotten the more iPod looking G4).
When we try to remember how the design of a year "looks", it's surprisingly hard to document everything you were exposed to. I've been trying to find this particular graphics card demo animations I'd seen in computer stores in Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I remember being induced into a right proper trance by some of them but I don't remember enough detail to find out what it was.
Scrolling through that page feels like an incredible speedrun of design history. You can literally see the decades fly by — the photography, layouts, and even the fonts slowly evolving until suddenly, around 2006, it all starts to feel “modern.”
I’m 37, and that’s exactly the point where it clicks for me — when things stop looking “old” and start looking like the world I remember stepping into as an adult. It’s fascinating how our personal timelines sync up with broader shifts in design trends.
These are amazing! I checked a few that around the era of some of my favourite TV shows, and I can totally see the "vibe" reflected in a couple of cases.
Also, as someone who enjoys to draw/paint, these are a great source of references!
I was 13, delivering advertisement to mailboxes (basically a newspaper boy, but delivering to every mailbox).
Most weeks it was one bag for my route. Except when the ikea catalogue arrived… I went back and forth and back and forth — that thing was thick and heavy!
Was IKEA furniture always self-assembled for the entire time? The catalogues are wonderful for how fashion changed, but I’d love to see the evolution of user-facing design in terms of simple, explained engineering.
For the Brits here I spent an hour or so last Christmas looking at old Argos catalogues from before and during my childhood. Great fun.
Argos is great, but doesn't have a patch on the old SkyMall catalogues you'd find in US carriers up to around 2010
Being a teenageer, those big catalogues sure were...educational.
The progression of the catalogue and furniture design from 1950 through to 1960 is remarkable. What a transformative time.
Yes, and the 1960s catalogs furniture seem still modern and would basically fit in a living room today. Timeless.
I feel like in the past, the furnitures have more color and soul and just furniture itself is enough to decorate homes, while newer furnitures are usually white and you need smaller and colorful things and more stuff to complete it - otherwise feels bland.
Wow, i randomly opened the 1960s catalog and the furniture looks just modern... they would perfectly fit in a todays living room.
Either time stood still in the furniture industry, they did timeless designs or the 60s trends are just coming back.
But I didnt expect that.
I'm by no means an interior designer, but my sense is that 60s/70s European design is pretty timeless. Especially if you take out the boldest colors, plastic-sheathed couches, and the like.
My sense is that modern furniture has generally fairly simple lines--and, from what I understand--younger generations tend to favor neutral color tones. While my house is relatively muted, it isn't the greyscale that I see among some younger folks.
Is there a reason IKEA doesn't bring back all of the classic designs from time to time?
They bring select designs back ALL the time. What do you mean?
Here is just one example (with historic catalog images included): https://www.ikea.com/global/en/stories/our-roots/vintage-ike...
Some would be hard for them to make at a reasonable price today and they wouldn't sell in big numbers at a higher price.
Adam Savage recently posted a video about his favorite IKEA cabinet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLAAxxjM_7U
The drawers have box joints which is something I can't imagine IKEA of today doing.
It's on page 311 of their 1997 catalog FYI.
Good housekeeping wrote as recently as 2023 that ikea kitchen cabinets used dovetail joinery.[1] But this runs counter to my and everyone I know's experience. Not sure how/why they could write that.
[1]https://www.aol.com/best-kitchen-cabinet-brands-according-19...
Every single Ikea kitchen furniture unit I've worked with has been flat pack, made of chipboard and assembled with these bolts that attach to a sort of a worm screw (edit: cam dowel lock nut), and some dowels, maybe a few screws. Not a single sheet of real wood or plywood, no dovetail or finger joints.
Yes the cams is how ikea put drawers together in just about everything. Its a pretty cool and good solution. It's just not a box joint
The only reason they wouldn't sell a drawer with a box joint today is because they wouldn't be able make the box flat enough. They certainly use even more complex joints even today.
> They certainly use even more complex joints even today.
IKEA does? What's an example?
https://www.ikea.com/se/en/p/uppdatera-storage-box-light-bam...
Previously:
The IKEA catalogue through the ages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997461 - Oct 2021 (64 comments)
Very cool. I wonder how much of that 1950s IKEA furniture has survived to today.
Likely more than today’s IKEA furniture will survive until 2100.
Someone is a Tested viewer...
Wait, so you saw this already and didn't share it with the rest of us? How selfish!
My first thought as well
So, can anyone find the mythical picture of Jeff Buckley in the 1998 catalog?
Other than the flower patterns on the sofas, 1976 looks pretty modern actually...
Where did the Eames chair lookalike disappear to after '68? I want one.
In corduroy! https://auctionet.com/en/2229425-fatolj-mila-hog-ikea-1960-t...
Hot damn. And downloadable as pdfs! Wasn't expecting this one...
holy cow I would have never guessed it went back 74 years! @_@
Was it only the English ones that got the dog penis?
I never realized that IKEA was over 80 years old.
They were founded during WWII and they don't like to think about what their founder was doing during those years.
1992 what happened?!
Lack table forever
[dead]
Ah, Sixties are knocking! Steel, Aluminium, Glass & Leather.
Shrugging....
one must be very pissed to degrade a comment which lines out explicitly wrongly driven design which never took off (it would be existing today!), which looks and feels cold, which gives a feeling of loneliness, handing over some nice "hey-it-looks-good"
the degrade of design & perception is remarkable.