How Ikea’s designers chose their favorite vintage pieces for the new anniversary collection
Four months ago, Ikea previewed a new collection to commemorate its 80th anniversary. The Nytillverkad collection, which has now officially launched, made headlines across the design world. But it left us wondering: How did a brand that has been so prolific for 80 years—a brand with more than 10,000 products in its range today—select which items should return to the spotlight? We asked, and Ikea answered.
It’s important to know that Ikea takes archiving very seriously. In 2016, the company turned its first store in Älmhult, Sweden, into the Ikea Museum, featuring historical photographs, product stories, films, and more. And in 2020, that museum launched a digital archive featuring 69 Ikea catalogs dating from 1951 (when the brand introduced its first catalog) to 2020 (when the catalogs were discontinued in favor of the Ikea website. RIP.) Anyone can still pick a year, browse through a catalog, and retrace how the Ikea aesthetic has evolved.
And this is exactly where Karin Gustavsson began. As head of the global Ikea product design team and creative leader of Nytillverkad, Gustavsson was in charge of sifting through the archives and selecting the products that she believed would resonate with today’s consumers.
Gustavsson was looking for armchairs and small and simple products that people could take home and use right away. She wanted designs that reflected Ikea’s identity, which she says was firmly established in the 1970s and ’80s when the brand began collaborating with designers. She also wanted to highlight female designers, including Karin Mobring, who designed the Domsten stool (now available in light green, lilac, and orange) and Charlotte Rude, who designed the Gogo easy chair, a version of which is launching next April.
The challenge for Gustavsson was that some of her picks were nowhere to be found in Ikea’s physical archives. “We don’t have everything in our archive, so it’s a bit of an investigation,” she says. For example, she was determined to reissue the Havsfjäder lampshade, designed by Danish designer Bent Gantzel-Boysen in the 1970s. She couldn’t locate it anywhere, until serendipitously her team found a yellowed version at a flea market.
“We took it apart; we didn’t really know if it was glass inside,” she says. It wasn’t. The shade was a slightly translucent plastic, and it came with a clicking mechanism that allows you to assemble it from flat in about 10 minutes. The team then 3D-scanned the original and made a custom mold that allowed them to manufacture the lamp. The reimagined version is launching in October and will be partially made from recycled plastic.
The Nytillverkad collection has an unapologetic color palette—bright shades of orange and green, plus some pastel hues—which is the most obvious change to the originals, but each product comes with invisible tweaks as well. The once-spinning arms of the cactus-shaped coat hanger, designed by Rutger Andersson in 1978, are now static as a way to balance the piece and prevent it from toppling. And the leaf table, originally designed with a walnut veneer, now comes in an ash veneer top overlaid in various colors.
The complete Nytillverkad collection includes about 80 products and is split into four “drops.” The first took place on July 1; the second was announced this week and is slated to be available in stores and online starting in October. The remaining two drops are scheduled for January and April 2024.
All products from the anniversary collection will be available for at least two years, according to Ikea. If only there were a catalog to immortalize them.
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