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Why Ikea Killed the Last Good Catalog
An obit for the icon of Swedish domesticity
Ikea means many things to many people, but for most, it’s something more durable than the veneered particleboard in a Billy bookshelf. For some, it’s a gateway to adulthood — the peak age of the Ikea buyer is 24 — before graduating to a more refined Crate & Barrel or West Elm. For others, it’s a totem of another life stage — parenthood or divorce or even empty-nesting — representing aspiration or failure or somewhere in between. No one captured this as viscerally as David Fincher in his 1999 film, Fight Club, in which the Narrator, an adrift twentysomething, wanders around his condo as it literally transforms into pages from Ikea’s “Fürni” catalog.
Which is perhaps why, when Ikea announced on Monday that it was ending its 70-year year run of the dictionary-sized catalog, it felt like a surprisingly rough cultural punch in the gut. In recent years, the company has printed more than 200 million copies, with hundreds of pages embodying Swedish home life with affordable price tags, in 72 editions across 35 languages. But the 2021 catalog will be Ikea’s last; just shy of the catalog’s 70th birthday, the privately held company, with $44 billion in annual revenue last year, announced it would be sending its annual book to the archives.
