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IKEA Catalogs 1951-2021

ikeamuseum.com

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Re: IKEA Catalogs 1951-2021

#81

Post by ahoka »

atombender wrote: post #43
ahartmetz wrote: post #18

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 t…

The IKEA innovation is fast fashion for furniture.

Re: IKEA Catalogs 1951-2021

#82

Post by kakacik »

makeitdouble wrote: post #65
Reason077 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

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…

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

Re: IKEA Catalogs 1951-2021

#83

Post by PetitPrince »

BoredPositron wrote: post #6

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…

> 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.

Re: IKEA Catalogs 1951-2021

#84

Post by ruszki »

bonoboTP wrote: post #63
ruszki wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: IKEA Catalogs 1951-2021

#85

Post by leokennis »

atombender wrote: post #43
ahartmetz wrote: post #18

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 t…

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.

Re: IKEA Catalogs 1951-2021

#86

Post by leokennis »

lavezza wrote: post #66

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…

> 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.

Re: IKEA Catalogs 1951-2021

#87

Post by petesergeant »

galfarragem wrote: post #28

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.

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

Re: IKEA Catalogs 1951-2021

#88

Post by kryptiskt »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #54
galfarragem wrote: post #28

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.

> 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.

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.

Re: IKEA Catalogs 1951-2021

#89

Post by cess11 »

112233 wrote: post #55

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?

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.

Re: IKEA Catalogs 1951-2021

#90

Post by wongarsu »

ahoka wrote: post #81
atombender wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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
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