After seventy years of existence, the Ikea catalog, which over the years had interfered in the privacy of many French people, will no longer be displayed on their living room tables. . The Swedish kit furniture giant has indeed announced in an official press release, Monday, December 7, that it will stop publishing its annual catalog from 2021. A “great and moving decision” for Konrad Grüss, the operational director of Inter Ikea. The rise of e-commerce, ecological concerns incompatible with the printing of several hundred pages to millions of copies, as well as the decline in activity of the Swedish giant in 2020:so many reasons which led to the sudden end of the magazine distributed in 50 countries and translated into 32 languages.
The first edition of the IKEA catalog was published in 1951 by its founder Ingvar Kamprad. It then included 4 pages devoted solely to furniture. 250,000 copies were printed. At the time, the idea of placing an object in a decor in the catalog doubled sales. And while print runs reached 2 million in 1964, they peaked at 35 million in 1984.
Expected now by 400 million readers each year, the IKEA catalog was until 2020 printed with nearly 200millions of copies per year in the world, thus ahead of Harry Potter and the Bible. Indeed, for centuries, the book of faith was the most distributed work with more than 2.5 billion copies since 1815.
The IKEA catalog has therefore become the largest circulation in the world.
Made in Almhult in Sweden where Ikea opened its first branch, the famous catalog is produced in the heart of Ikea's headquarters where one of the largest photo studios in the world is located; it measures more than 8,800 m2.
284 people (graphic designers, photographers and decorators) are employed full time just for its realization.
For example, in 2015, 20,911 photos were taken there for the catalog and the website and around 80 video sequences were filmed. In fact, three-quarters of the illustrations in the Swedish store's catalog are computer-generated.
So if it is one of the most famous acronyms in the world, few of us really know the hidden meaning of these four letters. Also note that the first two letters take the initials of the creator, Ingvar Kamprad, the third that of his native farm, Elmtaryd, and the last that of his native village, Agunnaryd.
