It was some 25 years ago, I was doing freelance for an ad agency, and while visiting the office and waiting for my appointment to finalize some paperwork I was browsing through these. When my guy finally showed up to pick me up he asked if I liked them and said - you can get these for free, just write them. So I did and they mailed me 10kg worth of albums. Just like that.
Just a cool memory from the past. Back then internet wasn't that rich, mobile phones were novelty, and when you visited a musuem or gallery and liked you bought a massive album to hold on to your memories.
These days, when visiting such places (think sistine chapel) I don't even bother to do pictures at all. If I want to recall something I can find endless stream of top quality pictures made by professionals with equipment worth as much as my car and in clinical settings, with no crowds and perfect lighting.
These were from about 50-100 years ago, and were great for scanning in and converting to vector art as various design elements. Usually these were artistic flourishes to include inline with text.
The one that stands out for me was engraved drawing of a fish that would not be out of place as a large print.
The colors afforded by your phone or camera probably have richer colors than is afforded by images you download of the place online, but may also be dependent on what you're doing and your camera settings.
In Canada it was Consumers Distributing (also Eaton's, Sears):
* 1992 catalog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTXbe9Mw17Q
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers_Distributing
* https://www.tvo.org/article/what-happened-to-consumers-distr...
You could buy something via mail or phone, but there were also shops: you would go there, fill out a form with tiny pencils (like an old school bank form), give it to the clerk, and they'd bring it to the cashier 'from the back'.
Instead we got really efficient price comparison and sometimes very useful but often gamed customer reviews...
It is naive to assume printing costs are the only costs involved.
I feel comfortable assuming IKEA had a better understanding of the economic fundamentals of the catalogue than HN commenters.
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.
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.
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).
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.
e.g. this dresser is available in many sizes but you wouldn't know from the product page: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/storklinta-3-drawer-chest-white...
At best you can then search for "STORKLINTA" but the result list has the other sizes mixed with all sorts of other products such as beds: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/search/?q=STORKLINTA
While a T-shirt has the same purpose in S M or L, a table isn't the same if it's lower smaller than 50cm or longer than 1.5m, or lower than 60cm or higher than 70cm. In a standard shop you'd call that a night stand, or a coffee table, or a kids' table or living room's low table etc.
If you think of it as shopping for an environment (same as half of the in-shop experience: they'll show you full rooms where you can see products fit together) it makes sense. Somewhat.
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.
[1]: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/cat/chests-of-drawers-10451/?filt...
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.
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.
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.
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.
And, yes, I would probably have bought some other things had I gone to the store.
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.
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
He has to sit through talks about how Ikea is a bussiness that already works very well and the most important thing is to avoid any changes that have even a 0.001% chance of making it not work. Many relatively trivial deployments have to be approved by a lengthy international bureaucracy, with a focus on preventing any automation that can eventually result in workforce not being needed. Things like that.
I worked for a few years at a 100+ year old privately owned (same family) B2B supplier with insane profits. Website was outdated but highly practical, sales/CRM (if you can call it that) systems were mostly command line and hadn't changed fundamentally since the 1980s. These systems worked, and any proposal to change anything took months of meetings and debates and review of every cost/benefit possible. Proving that a change directly translated to a clear revenue metric was nearly impossible– for at least this niche, would more modern sales software actually translate to more orders? (answer: not really, a question reanalyzed every few years in depth). Would a nicer website get more conversions? (also no, something A/B tested to death every few years). Changing the position of one product grouping by a few pixels might be a 6 month job, lol.
By contrast, their fulfillment center was cutting edge, highly automated, and relatively experimental– if it improved the speed and cut costs, they jumped right on. These are much easier to measure as profitable.
While I don't shop that much at Ikea, I still remember their product lines, will sift through the dozens of combinations and PDFs, and take notes while looking at the building instructions to see what could be done with a product.
Most of us will choose Ikea for the flexibility, and will happily do some amount of research anyway.
Until reading your comment it didn't hit me that the site was so different from other brands, like Apple for instance. And I sure don't enjoy Apple's site. But then Ikea shops aren't traditional shops either, if sifting through pages of products isn't your thing, walking through sinuous paths all around the shop won't be either.
It's a fundamentally different public.
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.
Certainly, Ikea organizes their stores in a way that probably encourages impulse purchases.
Why is everything so shit? Isn't getting me to buy their pax with as many interior elements as possible how they make money?
Ingvar Kamprad was a lifelong fascist, which heavily influences IKEA. Loyalty over competence, futurism over tradition, things like that.
* The POÄNG chair is a copy of Alvar Aalto's 406.
* Nakamura's earlier POEM copied both the 406 and a chair by Bruno Mathsson.
* FROSTA (now discontinued) is a copy of Aalto's Stool 60.
* KROMVIK copied Bruno Mathsson's Ulla bed frame.
* BORE copied Mathsson's Karin chair.
And so on. Ironically, some of these also have become classics of their own, or at least sought-after vintage objects.
IKEA sometimes comes up with original, sometimes novel designs, but generally they copy better designs with worse manufacturing quality rather than coming up with original ones.
And they are genuinely worse in terms of construction. For example, if you compare the wood quality of a FROSTA with Aalta's stool it's night and day. FROSTA is just plywood cut to size. The Aalto stool is solid birch, with a plywood top and an elegant solid birch veneer for the edge band, and the legs use a unique plywood-like join that is a thing of beauty [1].
[1] https://www.alvaraalto.fi/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/l-jalka...
Yes, I understand the whole "copying isn't innovation" part of the argument, but it is for the greater good.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Good furniture lasts hundreds of years!
It's solid wood, so it'll probably last another 40 years at least.
The 1959 catalog had thin, svelte, curved and up angled designs. The Mid 80's had plump, puffy, overstuffed and was quite tame-loud, whereas the 2020's has "I'm not here, white-black-pop of color" aesthetics.
[1] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/billy-bookcase-combination-brow...
https://archive.org/details/harrods-for-everything-images/mo...
* flipping through the pages I stopped with some interest on section for the "Optical Department" (page 84)
* I noticed the pince-nez glasses, and wondered "does pince-nez just mean 'pinch nose'?
* looked up pince-nez on Wikipedia[1], sure enough, pince-nez means "pinch nose".
* there is an interesting section in this article about early glasses [2]
* A citation in this section leads to "Renaissance vision from spectacles to telescopes," (p. 167) helpfully archived on the Internet Archive [3]
* paging through this book leads to a "fairly complete description of horn frame making in a Florentine carnival song of the early sixteenth century." [4] (p.171)
And finally, this "Florentine carnival song" has the following verse:
> Because they are made by
> necromantic artifice and the planets > of Mercury, Jupiter and Mars,
> herbal juices and very secret,
> they make men wise
> when they use these spectacles.
I had no idea of the necromantic powers I was invoking by wearing glasses!
Thanks for the fun diversion!
---
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pince-nez
[2]: > The earliest form of eyewear for which any archaeological record exists comes from the middle of the 15th century. It is a primitive pince-nez...
[3]: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_peIL7hVQUmwC/page/n167/mo...
[4]: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_peIL7hVQUmwC/page/n171/mo...
This could be a game. When was the first flat screen TV? When was the first CD rack? When was the first microwave?
There is a record player at '20:156. Did record players go away and then come back?
There are at least two typewriters in 2020 ('20:56 and '20:61). I wouldn't have expected typewriters in a 2020 catalog. Maybe that's a Swedish thing? Are typewriters still common in Sweden?
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.
Midcentury stuff like record players came back into vogue in the 2010s and 2020s; a typewriter would be one extension of such a retro fashion. Even today a vinyl is a common item in the merch shops of modern artists and bands. https://a.co/d/9FFBuEF
I think they do an excellent job of this in their stores. The mock rooms they have look so cozy and inviting. If they had a service where their designers would come to my home and help me replicate that vibe, I'd do it!
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.
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.
(I am obviously not the ikea museum, sorry - but what's your project?)
Also, as someone who enjoys to draw/paint, these are a great source of references!
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.
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.
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.
For decades we used to have daily newspapers delivered to our doorstep, and the price was low enough that almost anyone could afford it.
What an ingenious solution; I bet very few people would notice that everything is written in black(1). "Good design is invisible" indeed !
(1) except some of the product line (Ivar, Lack, etc), but those are invariant in all languages.
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!
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)
The problem is, no one wants to pay for this since no value is seen in such a paginated view --- even if AI could create such a typesetting routine.
An example:
https://archive.org/details/mouserelectronic00unse/page/190/...
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.
Here is just one example (with historic catalog images included): https://www.ikea.com/global/en/stories/our-roots/vintage-ike...
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.
[1]https://www.aol.com/best-kitchen-cabinet-brands-according-19...
The IKEA catalogue through the ages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997461 - Oct 2021 (64 comments)
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.
Shrugging....
the degrade of design & perception is remarkable.
