The IKEA catalogue through the ages

https://ikeamuseum.com/en/digital/ikea-catalogues-through-the-ages/

by pmcpinto • 5 years ago

72 62 5 years ago

arketyp4• 5 years ago

It used to be common in Sweden to see stickers by the mail slot that read "No advertisement, please! But gladly the IKEA catalogue." They stopped distributing the printed catalogue long before 2021, but I've kept the sticker.

yetanother-12• 5 years ago

Do you mind sharing an image of it?

arketyp4• 5 years ago

This is the same one I have on my front door: http://buschmeier.org/bh/stockholm/images/20051114_IKEA.jpg

rightbyte2• 5 years ago

I remember a time when you wanted (some) adds. I had a "No adds but the Cinema timetable and catalogues please" on my mailbox.

I almost miss the paper adds. Somehow they were wildly more relevant ...

smcl3• 5 years ago

Ha, does the postman/postwoman[0] respect the sign? I've got a "nevhazujte letáky" sticker on my mailbox ("no flyers/ads") that is completely ignored. As an immigrant this is particularly grating around election season when my mailbox is stuffed with material from a couple of anti-immigration candidates.

[0] - I just realised that I only use the Scottish gender-neutral slang "postie" and don't know the correct one in standard English :D

IgorPartola• 5 years ago

Boy I wish this was a thing in the US. The amount of junk mail I get is ridiculous.

Ma8ee3• 5 years ago

You could always order it for free from their website.

professor_v• 5 years ago

I definitely think it's a mistake that IKEA stopped printing their catalogues last year. The offline experience is totally different from online. Online I tend to do direct searches for things I already decided I want, but the IKEA catalog is perfect for casual browsing and getting new ideas for stuff I would've never bought otherwise.

It might come off as a cost saving short term, but I doubt in the end the catalogues did not bring in enough money anymore.

arketyp4• 5 years ago

I wonder to what extent it's due to considering the environmental impact bad publicity.

pelasaco• 5 years ago

probably cost saving, but disguised as CO2 emission reduction

mattowen_uk3• 5 years ago

Compared to this though?

"Ikea has for years sold children’s furniture made from wood linked to vast illegal logging in protected Russian forests, an Earthsight investigation has found."

https://www.earthsight.org.uk/news/press-release-illegal-rus...

jleahy• 5 years ago

Surely cutting down fast growing trees and burying them in landfill is a great way to sequester co2?

iamacyborg2• 5 years ago

Given IKEA essentially produce throwaway furniture by design, I don't think they've got much of a leg to stand on when it comes to environmental responsibility.

Just buying more stuff is literally how they have historically marketed themselves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBqhIVyfsRg

Aardwolf• 5 years ago

Or they could improve the website to make it easier to get an overview of everything by category and scroll through listings with details with as little clunkiness and ephemeralness as possible

forgotmypw17• 5 years ago

Production of catalogs like this squeezes our biome, and if we don't turn back, it will pop, and we'll be left with only enough resources for a small fraction of us to survive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26163808

jasode• 5 years ago

, but the IKEA catalog is perfect for casual browsing and getting new ideas for stuff I would've never bought otherwise.

Understand the advantage of serendipity by flipping through pages instead of entering product search queries.

Fyi, the latest 2022 catalogs are available online with the typical "print book" layout and also downloadable as pdf:

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/customer-service/catalogues/

With pdf catalogs, you get the undirected window shopping without killing trees and adding to landfills.

EDIT reply to: >Those PDFs really don't work well on mobile devices.

Sorry for not being clear. The initial UI is not a pdf. They are web browser "digital catalogs" with page layouts similar to a printed book. There's also an option to download to pdf file.

I just tried it on my smartphone and the pages look fine. No pdf download necessary.

dividedbyzero• 5 years ago

Nowadays most people will probably use their phones for this sort of thing. Those PDFs really don't work well on mobile devices.

cj2• 5 years ago

without killing trees and adding to landfills.

I wonder what leads to worse pollution. A world where all information is printed and there are are no computers, or a world where no one uses paper and computers, cell phones, Kindles, etc proliferate.

midasuni2• 5 years ago

Not just IKEA. Argos and CPC both stopped catalogues, and my purchase with them declined. Argos especially had a USP over amazon being the “book of dreams”, something to leaf through in a Sunday morning and go “oooh”

Now I simply buy stuff on Amazon.

busia• 5 years ago

Bring them back!

lqet2• 5 years ago

I am surprised to see that my beloved Poäng armchair (mine has served me well for 20 years now, with a new upholstery every 6 years) is already present on the cover of the 1977 catalogue: https://ikeacatalogues.ikea.com/77436/1102677/pages/4a7b75dd...

The part for sitting seems to have been made out of metal back then, in my version, it is the same plywood material as the frame.

2muchcoffeeman• 5 years ago

Billy has been around since 1979. Don’t mess with the classics!

lqet2• 5 years ago

I was aware of that, but I would've never guessed that IKEA started selling Poäng before they started selling Billy.

Gravityloss• 5 years ago

Usually with furniture there are forerunner designers / manufacturers that establish an innovation, then all mass manufacturers copy it a decade or two or five later.

For example the cantilever laminated wood frame chair made an appearance already in the 1930s. https://www.artek.fi/en/products/armchair-401

Cantilever steel tube + cane chair Cesca from 1928. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesca_Chair

tonyedgecombe• 5 years ago

It's interesting to see the price of the Poäng over time:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/roede...

from:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-weird-economics-of-...

I know people here like to criticise Ikea but they are remarkably good at squeezing cost out of their business.

aqsalose• 5 years ago

It was a retro-chair already in the 1970s. See here Aalto's Armchair 406 (made and sold by Artek) from 1939.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Armchair+406+aalto&iax=imag...

Jensson3• 5 years ago

The room ins the 80's looks like modern rooms. The decades before looks more alien/old, so it seems like furniture stopped changing much about 40 years ago.

To me it is interesting seeing how progress was fast and then slowed down at different points in different fields. Like, how far back do you have to go before you start noticing that these things aren't new? For webpage design you see how it was really different 20 years ago, but not that different 10 years ago, game graphics mostly peaked 5-10 years ago depending on genre (people still happily buy and play gta5 that is 8 years old without cringing at its graphics) etc.

vintermann3• 5 years ago

40 years ago was when teak went out of fashion (possibly out of concern for the rainforest?) and pine went in. But I think it has changed a lot still from that, 80s living rooms still look alien to me even though I'm old enough to remember them.

The IKEA 80s living rooms have some things in common with those I've seen in old films and sitcoms (e.g. Back to the Future), but it's still not quite the same. IKEA 80s catalog images are as it was in Norway though, totally.

Jensson3• 5 years ago

I really can't see any notable difference between the 1983 catalogue and the 2013 one. Mostly that the more modern ones has messy rooms with people and stuff in them, but the furniture looks the same.

If you care a lot about furniture fashion maybe it is easier, but to me those are the same.

vintermann3• 5 years ago

I don't know if it is that way for the rest of the world, but here in Scandinavia those are extremely iconic of what living rooms looked like by decade.

brabel• 5 years ago

Looks like my house stopped in the 80's :D

tdrdt3• 5 years ago

I always think it is a nice fact that over 70% of all images (maybe even 90% today) in the latest catalogues are 3D renders.

This gives IKEA the ability to change things (plants, wallpapers, and so on) depending on different cultures without having to completely change a studio.

Edit: a YT video from 3 years ago about the workflow: https://youtu.be/bJFlslL1wFI Textures are prepared in Photoshop, models made and textured in 3DsMax, rendered with V-Ray.

draugadrotten2• 5 years ago

It also allows them to erase all women.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/10/02/162139455...

tdrdt3• 5 years ago

This is from 2012 and was done without IKEA's consent.

robin_reala• 5 years ago

IKEA is a Khronos Group promoter member: https://www.khronos.org/members/list

(note: my employer is a part of the IKEA group)

iampivot• 5 years ago

Wish I could buy the furniture of 40 years ago instead of the stuff they make now.

Edit: maybe not, just had a look at their 1981 catalogue...

agloeregrets• 5 years ago

For what it is worth,the Pöang is pretty much unchanged except it is dramatically less expensive now.

subpixel2• 5 years ago

Why, why did the Kramfors sofa get killed off? It was a $400 sofa that rivaled $3000 sofas from other manufacturers and nothing in the market comes close these days.

iamacyborg2• 5 years ago

It was a $400 sofa that rivaled $3000 sofas

Sure, in much the same way a £10 tshirt from Uniqlo matches a £90 tshirt from Sunspel. They're not really the same thing.

subpixel2• 5 years ago

I don't know from Sunspel, but I paid $4000 for the seating in my living room and I would trade it for a pair of Kamfors right now.

yobbo• 5 years ago

So many of the designs are timeless classics, but the older pictures make them look dated. It's the look-and-feel of the room, decor, colour balance, lightning, picture quality that make the pieces in the pictures look dated, as if they "belong in the past".

If you place these exact pieces in an otherwise modernly decorated room (colour balance of walls/ceilings/lightning), and photograph with modern style - they instead look classy and timeless.

It's rare that people can isolate which sensory impressions make them react in a certain way emotionally. Here it's clearly not the designs, but the styling/lightning/photos.

dirtyid2• 5 years ago

IKEA catalogues, products and how they're rendered vary regionally, hard to capture it all with just English Catalogues. I have new IKEA products page from China/US/Germany bookmarked to see satisfy my Ikea enthusiasm. Interestly, hometurf Sweden doesn't get a lot of new products.

The IKEA catalogue through the ages

Related Stories