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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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 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?
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
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.
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.
47 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 63.0 ms ] threadI'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)
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.
Shrugging....
https://archive.org/details/harrods-for-everything-images/mo...
The IKEA catalogue through the ages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997461 - Oct 2021 (64 comments)
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.
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.
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!
Ingvar Kamprad was a lifelong fascist, which heavily influences IKEA. Loyalty over competence, futurism over tradition, things like that.
Why is everything so shit? Isn't getting me to buy their pax with as many interior elements as possible how they make money?
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?
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
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.