Ikea Catalogs 1951-2021

In corduroy! https://auctionet.com/en/2229425-fatolj-mila-hog-ikea-1960-t...

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 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.

Likely more than today’s IKEA furniture will survive until 2100.

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.

> 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.

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.

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...

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.

Wait, so you saw this already and didn't share it with the rest of us? How selfish!

My first thought as well

Yes, and the 1960s catalogs furniture seem still modern and would basically fit in a living room today. Timeless.

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...

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...

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

As a kid in the UK, Argos catalogues were magical.

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".

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...

They were founded during WWII and they don't like to think about what their founder was doing during those years.

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?)

DM me!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

> 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.

Do you think the system might have been called Algot?

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.