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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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'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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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)
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 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!
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I still regularly receive printed papers at my (building's) doorstep; they are printed in color, and completely dedicated to ads.
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.
The progression of the catalogue and furniture design from 1950 through to 1960 is remarkable. What a transformative time.
Previously:
The IKEA catalogue through the ages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997461 - Oct 2021 (64 comments)
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...
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.
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
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.
Other than the flower patterns on the sofas, 1976 looks pretty modern actually...
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Was it only the English ones that got the dog penis?
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...
holy cow I would have never guessed it went back 74 years! @_@
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.