IKEA Redesigns Its Bestsellers
wsj.com
wsj.com
Yes you buy something for 1/3rd the cost of something made of real wood but it'll last 1/20th the time.
What is particularly irritating is when you try to insert a cam or a screw and it totally mutilates the particle board rendering it useless or at least severely compromising the structure.
I'd rather see prices stay higher (so I'm screwed in a way that I'm aware) instead of getting screwed in unknown ways.
Ikea, or someone else could probably make huge profits and great quality furniture where you buy the flatpack with hardware and veneers from them but it's design to add your own wood for massively improved stability. You could even have a few guys with miter and table saws chopping locally sourced 2x4s and plywood that fits the kit.
We have a lot of solid wood dressers here, this is just a few:
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/hemnes-8-drawer-dresser-white-s...
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/rast-3-drawer-chest-pine-104847...
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/bjoerksnaes-5-drawer-chest-birc...
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/tarva-5-drawer-chest-pine-10360...
Latvia: https://www.ikea.lv/lv/products/gulamistaba/kumodes/kumodes/...
Estonia: https://www.ikea.ee/en/products/bedroom/chests-of-drawers/ch...
The Rast and Björksnäs ones are also available, but not the Tarva one.
Selection in Vilnius is very similar as in NYC area, lately.
I also don't think a hand plane will help you with warped boards much, and buying sizable not-warped wood is gonna likely add to your cost unless you get lucky at Home Depot. I've never had as much luck with the DIY fixes for that as others. I dunno what the hand version of a jointer is but I don't want to find out. ;)
You don't need a lot of power tools to do pretty cool stuff, but cabinetry is one of the tougher things to do precision-wise if you're unpracticed or don't have tools that make it easy to get repeatable results.
I make quite a lot of furniture from scrap or salvage - that's quite fun.
Part of the trick to doing this on the cheap and easy is recognizing that many times (e.g., bookcases, or cases for cabinets (order doors from an Internet shop) the precise dimensions matter less than consistency between the pieces. I did a bunch of built-in bookcases a few years ago after my table saw died, and had Lowes cut all the 3/4 Birch ply down to about 9 inches. They won't do or guarantee precision cuts, but I just had them set up the saw once and rip out all the strips from several sheets of plywood at once, so all were identical width, which I could then easily cut to length with a power miter saw. I saved thousands of dollars over the quotes I got from local carpenters and cabinetmakers, and the result is very close to what I would have gotten from them. (BTW, another pro tip is General Finishes "Milk Paint", which is expensive, but worth every penny - put it on with a good brush and the stuff self-levels so well it looks very close to a pro sprayed finish, and comes in a wide range of colors.)
Kiln dried whitewood still produces sap and dents easier than any MDF I have worked with.
By whitewood I presume you mean that mysterious asian species of wood, that dominates the market.
Byt here's my tip - for amateur woodworking, go to a speciality lumber yard that sells S4S. They have discounted and returned items at fairly low prices. I made two bedside tables out of warped, cracked oak shelving S4S boards at about 30% of the cost of materials. But... that was still a hobby project that I had spare time for. If I accounted for the average cost of a carpenter's hourly wages - those items would cost easily $2000 each in labor.
NORDVIKEN
Table top:
Particleboard, Ash veneer, Stain, Tinted clear acrylic lacquer, Paper foil
[1] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/nordviken-extendable-table-blac...
For extra points you can wipe polyurethane along any raw particle-board surfaces to seal them, like those on the bottom of a vertical unit.
It's about five minutes extra effort and $0.50 worth of glue for something like a large Billy bookcase.
This basically turns the entire piece into a single composite structure. It's incredibly durable. You cannot disassemble it to move but you can move it whole many, many times without anything breaking.
I have had to take a large sledgehammer to an Ikea entertainment center that I'd glued.
Walmart garbage does not respond the same way to this treatment. The Walmart (or Wayfair) particle board is a wooden oatmeal cookie. It crumbles from within regardless of how the joints are treated.
We've even have an older version of a shelf unit that is nice, solid pine, and gone and bought the current version and the current version has changed to that wooden oatmeal cookie[1] crap.
Glue does still help, though.
1. Great term, so fitting! I'm stealing it.
In the past most of their table tops were solids, with only the cheapest ones being hollow. As they phased out those original tops and replaced them with identically priced updates, the vast majority become cardboard honeycomb filled.
When you're selling $200 cardboard filled table tops, I'm not sure how much more blood you can squeeze from the stone.
I have had to order replacement drawers and had issues with having to reattach it often, until I just glued it all down and now it's lasted and is completely stable.
This alone is probably worth its weight in gold.
You can argue Ikea has had huge environmental impact, but you are commenting under an article that highlights some of the ways they're reducing that through materials.
Your "knowledge" of IKEAs business practices is "lacking"
Many customers don't care about tomorrow (when they are on their keens cursing putting the thing they ordered together) or the next year (when they move house and it falls apart). They care about now. Convenience is king. Ikea know what they are doing.
You have to spend quite a bit more to consistently beat it. Or you have to be really into non-trendy (so, no mid-century-modern) used furniture.
Ikea's stuff is crap (especially their lower-end items) but it's, like, good crap, by comparison.
With IKEA, anyway, once you get into their actual quality items, they start to get more expensive than other options at the same quality level. (A caveat: I don't shop from Walmart so I have no idea about their quality scale).
And IKEA stuff costs a lot less than 1/3 of finished solid wood furniture.
There are a lot of people who consistently move apartments every 1-3 years and don't even want to take their old stuff to the next one, because it makes no sense in a new layout. I have 3 Billy bookcases in my current apartment to fit precisely the width between two pillars in the wall, and when I move they'll go straight to the curb. I had a totally different set of bookcases in my last apartment because the layout was totally different.
Maybe you want prices to stay higher, but I and most other people sure don't.
I have a few very nice expensive non-IKEA pieces (couch, bed, kitchen table) that last and which I take from apartment to apartment. But everything else is "modular storage/surfaces" (bookcases, cubbies, side/end tables, dresser, bedside table, desk) which is for the current apartment only because it fits it specifically. I want it to be cheap and disposable. IKEA fills the need perfectly, and I want prices to stay as low as possible. I don't want to spend more so any of it would last a move.
(And many times moving isn't even an option. Because you move in with somebody else so you toss all your old furniture, or you move across the country and you'd rather cheaply send a few boxes via post, rather than hiring an expensive moving service.)
Some of it has. Not everything they offer is particle board, etc. though.
Sending it to the local waste-to-energy plant and buying new stuff, three times, doesn't necessarily have to be meaningfully worse for the environment than buying "solid" stuff once, then moving it twice over a long distance (in a relatively inefficient, one-off move rather than large-scale logistics).
Consider if you're moving cities (lets say 250 miles) and going from a 10' van to a 17' van (with the assorted Ikea furniture) moves you from 12mpg to 10mpg - that's 20 gallons of gas to 25 gallons of gas. That's an extra 45 kg of CO2 emissions.
Buying new furniture at the new destination then is a smaller incremental cost of going to Ikea anyways.
And while I'll admit that this is a very simplistic analysis, the corresponding assertion that doing this is a larger carbon footprint may fail to take into account some nuances.
This keeps getting repeated.. but when I was studying, I bought used IKEA furniture, moved it around several times to different apartments, and then sold it again when I moved from that city.
I've also renovated my house recently which involved disassembling and reassembling some IKEA furniture. They're still fine.
It depends on the type of furniture of course. Yes, there are some specific ones that are harder to disassemble and move without breaking them. But not all.
> I want it to be cheap and disposable.
Isn't it possible to sell them on something like craigslist? I've bought and sold used IKEA furniture before, but I guess it depends on country/culture how willing people are to buy them.
> which is for the current apartment only because it fits it specifically.
I think this is an excellent point. We live in a home I intend to stay in for a long time. It's a bit on the small side, but we try to make the most of it by optimizing the furniture for that specific home. I've even customized IKEA furniture, cutting them to the right width etc. This lets us avoid moving to a new, larger home. That would certainly cost a lot and would be very resource intensive.
I can imagine the next owner would want to keep at least some of the furniture for at least the first few years too, depending on their life situation.
I think this is kind of like how some people complain that Apple USB cables are pieces of crap that are always fraying and breaking after 6 months, while other people use them for years with zero issue.
It really depends on how you use it, how you assemble it, how you disassemble it, is it constantly swaying/weakening a little or is it securely mounted to a wall, do you constantly slam the cubby door or drawer shut or are you gentle? I think the assumption should be that it won't last a move, but that you can get lucky through a combination of chance and care.
I just looked it up and it was the Galant desk with T-frame legs, sadly discontinued in 2014.
In general I've had good experiences with the office furniture from IKEA. My current desk is a custom oiled wood butcher block slab with (adjustable) IKEA legs, and the legs are perfect - easy to install, don't slip, stable etc.
I suppose you mean IVAR, but then I'm surprised as I have practically the whole IVAR assortment, coming mostly from when we had a move at work and renewed furniture there. The wooden racks, wooden cupboards, metal cupboards, I have them all and I love them. They have followed me through multiple house moves as well. They replaced basic pine racks that I got from some hardware store, that were not much cheaper and much less sturdy even though... well I still use them anyway, so I guess they're not so bad.
At one time I turned one IVAR metal cupboard into a growbox for tropical plants (the hollow space at the bottom and the mobile rack inside were pretty handy for running wires, pipes and placing the equipment) and it held very well the humidity, that was about ten years ago, I turned it back into a normal cupboard now and it's still as new. I now use a MILSBO cabinet as my indoor greenhouse.
Your mention of cubboards might be the thing - you need to build it out around the cupboard instead of trying to just use it for shelves.
Ha! They don't even sell 937.636.09 anymore, so maybe the problem was those damn corners. I ended up using https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/H-2455/Chrome-Wire-Shel... instead, and the thing was cheaper than the IVAR.
More power to you, wish I could have sent all the pieces to someone; as it was I burned them in rage.
I would expect wire metal shelving to be much cheaper than what you can find at Ikea of course, but also quite flimsy.
Now I'm no Ikea salesman but I always fail to understand what I read on HN (or other US-centric social media sites, as far as I can tell?) when the topic of Ikea comes around.
Prior to that, and now again, they are metal.
They have also discontinued it. Probably related to this article since they were made with solid wood.
They probably still have similar wood countertops you can buy and use for the same purpose, though.
Not just particleboard.
The closest you'll get now are particleboard tops with "thick" veneer. VRENA and MÖLLEKULLA use "thick" oak veneer; KARLBY, BARKABODA, and PINNARP use a "thick" walnut veneer. Veneer being IKEA's choice of words, not mine. These have traditional laminate on the underside.
SKOGSÅ uses "thick" veneer on all sides but is still a particleboard core.
SÄLJAN and EKBACKEN are laminate.
TOLKEN is solid bamboo (this must be new).
Then they're very inconsistent, because I've had multiple Apple USB and power cables that were secured to a desk in cable runs and connectors, and sat on a desk with a cable organizer, and still managed to fray while being moved no more than a few inches to plug/unplug in their life.
1. Buyers will nickel-and-dime you - just ignore them.
2. Ask for free delivery - sucks to be them.
3. Flake on scheduled meetings - schedule them when you're working from home or during weekends, make it clear that if they're late the deal is off.
4. Show up without enough cash - sucks to be them.
5. Maybe even try to rob you - small furniture - don't meet in your home. Bigger items - have other people at home when they come.
It works for you, you have headspace and you are mentally well composed to deal with that crap.
I’m not, so much rather dump furniture on the curb/trash of course after checking with family and friends in case they would need or want to take it for free. If they take it and sell it off good for them.
That’s extra effort for me, but it makes me feel a lot better.
That tells you enough about the rate of success overall
The movers would disassemble and reassemble whatever I paid them to move. Your movers are weird.
They won't dissassemble/reassemble IKEA furniture because it's too likely to fail and then they'd be on the hook for replacement cost, through no fault of their own.
Literally the first Google result for "will movers reassemble ikea furniture" states:
> "Though individual policies vary, most movers will not disassemble and reassemble IKEA furniture, and some even require their customers to sign waivers against damage."
Even if you sign a waiver, they still won't do it because of customer dissatisfaction -- bad reviews with "they ruined my furniture and wouldn't replace it" etc.
While it's not the cheap stuff and movers never actually had to disassemble anything more than the bed frame, I have never seen "we don't move IKEA furniture" or any kinds of furniture related wavers.
If the back of the cabinet is nailed on, it's never going to survive removal and re-assembly. It might not survive normal wear-and-tear if you use it a lot.
If the process involves wood screws that bear weight, those joints won't survive disassembly.
IKEA furniture can mean lots of different things.
The Billy bookcase specifically (which this article is primarily about) is not super great at surviving moves. Infact I had to reinforce mine just to hold lots of hard-cover books.
I'm ok with that because the price was so low it still was cheaper that getting stronger bookcases, and because they look good.
> I've also renovated my house recently which involved disassembling and reassembling some IKEA furniture. They're still fine.
Indeed, I still have all of my original IKEA furniture after 7+ moves - none have "fallen apart". They just require partial disassembly to move. My IKEA desk and Billy bookcases are >20 years old and in great condition.
I'm not quite sure how people manage to be so destructive when moving.
IKEA makes many products that are metal(I have a couple carts like that) and even some of their particle board furniture(two large dressers I have) do fine if you move them carefully.
My moves were from SoCal to the Bay Area and back, so not cross country, but not local either.
How you treat your stuff and how carefully you (dis)assemble it matters a lot.
IKEA has different levels of quality, including amazing cardboard LACK.
IKEA also has a lot of solid wood furniture.
What pertains to the article, is that IKEA is keeping prices of the expensive stuff lower than competition... by pushing materials to their limits.
I had moderately expensive IKEA furniture and I had "designer furniture". IKEA isn't much different. I have Besta unit, that has moved multiple times thousands of miles over the last 8 years... still looks pretty good.
I have some other solid wood IKEA pieces that are nearly as old.
Other IKEA stuff has been chocked in the trash over the years but generally it's a good value for the money. I can now afford better than IKEA but alternatives often cost much, much more and I'd rather not spend that much for my kid's furniture that needs to last only a few years anyway. I do shop elsewhere for stuff I'd rather keep longer.
I've had the same Ikea Jerker desk since 1998. It still looks like new, and I've moved across the country with it several times. I even bought a few more when I could... they stopped making them 10-15 years ago. Best desk ever made. Totally modular, so you can canabalize other parts and mix and match to get exactly the desk configuration you want.
https://www.thefrugalnoodle.com/jerker-standing-desk/
https://images.offerup.com/mn6NJESc_F7ekPiguDHgD08JNcI=/600x...
The important thing to remember here is that the structural members are entirely metal on that desk. As I recall, it's a full metal frame that doesn't use the tabletop as a structural member.
That right there is the trick to stable cheap furniture. If you get a metal frame it should be pretty durable!
To put things into perspective, I ordered a desk from a local company. I had a lot of customization options, but basically I wanted a 60 x 30" top. The legs I ordered actually have height adjustment ... with a CRANK. Because it'll never break. So you have 60-inch long boards, maybe about 4-inches wide each, pressed together into a single board. There's attempt to match up the pattern, so at a quick glance most people would think it's a solid piece. Also not much heavier, because there's less adhesives needed to produce the single board.
With the top you had choices not only in the type of wood, but how that wood was engineered (or if it was a single piece).
* If I went with a butcher block construction, which is heavier, that was $1200.
* I went with a face-grain engineered walnut top. That was $2000 for just the top. Looks great, too.
* If I went with a SINGLE solid board, there was not only a real lead time, but the top was $6500.
And that was just for American walnut. I could've picked far pricier woods. Could've picked some garbage pine or something too, but note the spread there. I think for a 60x30, the total spread of options was $500 to $11,000 depending on the construction and the wood chosen.
This is because nature is really bad at producing large perfect boards, especially for a total area past a few square feet. Turns out. A lot of stuff we use even in modern construction is not just engineered, but often uses petroleum products. Plywood uses a urea formaldehyde, but lo-and-behold we figured out how to produce that out of oil! OSB is no different. It's why when 5-over-1s under construction (before fire suppression equipment is installed) catch fire, they go up very fast, and usually burn hot enough where the radiant heat damages nearby buildings.
When you get into large single pieces, not only are they rare, but you want to let the moisture release, preferably naturally. So you have all these boards, being stored in large climate controlled warehouses for months if not years, before they are used in a piece of furniture. That massive opportunity cost of literally keeping boards around is part of why you pay.
I have some short "entertainment benches" I bought many years ago that were made by Ethnicraft in Vietnam, I believe for Crate & Barrel. Engineered face grain, walnut, on a nickel-plated steel parsons style base. Got them over a decade ago, still look perfect, and at a glance, people think they're one piece. They're not, but again at a quick glance they do. All in they were $4500 for the pair. I could've got some solid ones from a German company named E15. The pair would've been over $20,000 then, and over $30,000 today.
-- -----
Meanwhile, you can get a similarly sized desk from IKEA, with legs, for $370. It's particle board with a glued on outer surface to protect it.
Butcher block is environmentally friendly because it’s made from lots of small pieces that might otherwise be scrap.
Also, at least in the US, you can get a 30x60 piece of butcher block from a big-box hardware store for not much more than that IKEA desk.
[1] https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=43563
[2] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/saeljan-countertop-oak-effect-l...
IKEA also has an electric height-adjustable desk frame for maybe $300 I think
[1] https://www.bunnings.com.au/specrite-1800-x-405mm-18mm-timbe...
Heavy as hell though!
https://www.homedepot.com/b/Kitchen-Countertops-Butcher-Bloc...
Home Depot’s countertops are kind of overpriced, and it’s still only a few hundred dollars for a desk-sized piece.
Also, butcher block is fairly light, at least compared to plywood, OSB or particle board.
When I did mine I went with a jarvis frame and a custom glass top from a local glass company. The frosted (and tempered) 72x30x0.5 top cost me about $600, weighs about 100lbs, can easily handle a like 900lb load with no issue. Super durable. As long as I don't throw broken spark plugs at it or strike the edge with a hammer. And I put 2" radiuses on the corners so you can't break it by bumping something into it quite as easily.
I LOVE IT!
That said, every other person I've shown it to on the internet thinks it's tacky and I should've gone with a "more mature looking ikea butcher block" or something lol.
A NACKANÄS table is solid wood (they call it "acacia" which probably means false acacia) for 250€ (including tax).
For a more classical desk, HEMNES is also solid wood (probably pine) and 299€ including tax.
I've moved all of mine 3-4 times and it's fine. It actually got stronger last time because the mover's hobby was repairing Ikea furniture.
But for me the Billy bookcases have moved great. I have some that have now survived 3 moves and minus some scratches on the side (which isn't really anything unique to Ikea) they look and function like brand new. One of these even has glass doors on it.
Now I have never bought or tried to move a bed from Ikea, but I think their organization stuff like Billy, Kallax, move just fine.
Looking at beds (frames, not boxspring), it’s 1/2 to about the same (that one is partially solid wood) compared to what we paid for fully solid wood 2 months ago, far from "a lot less".
[1] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/assembly_instructions/kallax-shel...
More recently, my GALANT desks have survived international moves just fine. Sadly they are now discontinued.
We also have moved ikea couches multiple times and they are fine. It is easy to get replacement cushions when the kids spill stuff on the couches and when the wife decides she wants to get rid of it, it doesnt bother me. We have had our ikea for 6-7 years now, but before that we had very expensive louis shanks furniture and when her tastes changed to modern we got rid of it all.
She wants to change the dining room furniture, but at 1K per chair with 12 chairs that is not happening.
I was always wondering where people's disposable income went :-))
People who know what a Knoll Wassily is worth and are willing to pay anything near what it's worth just buy a new one.
To everyone else, it's just that weird leather chair you see in every office because of knockoffs, and you'll be competing with knockoffs on pricing. The fact you put "ORIGINAL KNOLL" in your listing won't mean anything to them.
Around here Facebook Marketplace is chock full of furniture like that. While I was waiting for my furniture to be shipped across the chair I was looking for a temporary dining set: I ended up with $2,000 marble table for $300 because the owner had underestimated how long it'd take to sell and needed someone to pick it up in 48 hours.
It's the cirrrrcle of consumerrrr capitalismmmmmmm
Probably because the marketing industry has tricked us into this way of thinking. The traditional model of buying good quality 'goods' and passing them through generations is not good for business. They even managed to sell bottled water and a lot of people drive SUVs to go to the shops. I bought a couch recently and I could not find one with washable covers. Companies love selling tacky shit that we'll have to replace in a few years and it's terrible for the planet. I feel there should be a tax on fragile, low quality junk or perhaps a 10 year warranty or disposal costs baked into the price. The external cost of the pollution (microplastics, e-waste etc) is not factored into the price of anything. I try to buy used if I can but admittedly it's not always easy to make the trades compared to buying from a retail box store.
There's no trick about it. Lots of people like new things. Lots of people get new phones, new cars, new TVs, new clothes, new video games, and yes new furniture.
Almost nobody cares about the griping of a few curmudgeons complaining about what they think is tacky or terrible for the planet -- not even most self-proclaimed environmentalists you see flying around the world with the latest gadgets and expensive clothes.
I think you missed OP’s point. Why do you think lots of people like to buy new things? They weren’t born with an instinctive desire to do something that happens to directly profit companies.
It's already repairable fairly easily with basic tools, and it's probably cheaper and easier to reinforce the points where it breaks with a block of scrap or something than to buy actual nice furniture.
Injection molding is cheap, I'm not sure why they don't use plastic inserts instead of bare wood on metal.
I'm also not sure why they try to hide screws so hard and avoid brackets and other hardware. Letting screws show and selling a matching line of tablecloths and mats to hide them would be a more complete implementation of the "Design to make stuff work without quality materials" philosophy.
The fake wood has potential. I still like it even though it doesn't have really value or quality, because... it works amazingly well for what it is, and there's still room to improve.
Also, I've observed this trend starting way earlier than the pandemic and the start of recent inflation, I bought their butcher block countertops in 2013 and 2018 for my workshop. Let me just say I ripped out my 2013 ones and transferred as much of the old ones to the new workshop as I could.
I can see two reasons for this article:
1. Their customers are noticing and it shows in survey and satisfaction and this is an attempt at curtailing the reputation damage (but don't really see why it's in the WSJ then, maybe it'll show in the coming quarterly/yearly's and they can point to this later?),
2. or they're signaling to investors that they're going to boost profitability and/or margins.
Either way, not really a positive trend in my eyes.
But also unfortunately, it's not like the alternatives are generally much better :/ Seems to be an industry-wide trend.
EDIT: nevermind, Ikea is entirely privately held -- no investors to placate, so 1. maybe?
They don't have any investors. They have literally been building and growing this organically for 80 years.
They however dont make it easy to identify like Kirkland Signature or Lexus.
Solid wood is dimensionally unstable and my oak chest of drawers requires special oil treatments to keep cracks from appearing. Plywood or melamine boards are way better for furniture.
Not sure what I'll do if this MARKUS gives up the ghost too. They redesigned the MARKUS and dropped the leather option, and the non-leather MARKUS has pitiful armrests.
Anyway, the very first paragraph has this:
ÄLMHULT, Sweden—Amid IKEA’s colorful staged living rooms, piles of umlaut-laden housewares and endless rows of flat-pack boxes is furniture that can have shoppers wondering: How does that chair cost only $35?
Which I think is really bad writing for a publication like the WSJ. Swedish does not have "umlauts". We have three letters more than the US English alphabet, but only two of them (Ä and Ö) have the double dots: the third has a ring (Å). These three are real first-class letters though, they are not "umlauted" (which means changed from some base letter due to grammar).
But what the two dots are not: they are definitely not diaeresis.
You don't think of "y" being "u" with an Umlaut. For you this is a completely seperate letter. Ditto with ÄÖÅ im Swedish and ÆØÅ in Danish (Æ is never thought of as combined A and E).
No. The German alphabet contains 26 letters, A-Z, plus 4 special letters, ÄÖÜẞ.
The Swedish alphabet contains 29 letters, A-ZÅÄÖ.
Otherwise, except when discussing German, I think "two dots" is much more common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_dots_(diacritic)
In English, ¨ is a diacritic mark called diaeresis, which indicates that a vowel is distinct, and shouldn't be diphthongized or dropped: Coöperation, Noël, Brontë.
In German, ¨ is a diacritic mark called umlaut, which transforms the vowels A, O, and U into their umlauted versions: Ä, Ö, and Ü. These characters are not distinct letters of the German alphabet, but belong to a special weird in-between class.
In Swedish, ¨ is not a diacritic mark, does not have a name, and is simply an integral part of the letters Ä and Ö, which together with Å are distinct letters of the Swedish alphabet. The dots aren't modifiers, they're not optional, Ä is not sort-of-an-A, it's as distinct from A as any other vowel, and its pronunciation is closer to E than A.
Ä in Swedish originated as the AE ligature where the E moved upwards and above the A until it became stylized as two dots. In Danish and Norwegian, they instead promoted Æ to a distinct letter.
Wikipedia does a great job for example for Ü, distinguishing between U-umlaut, U-diaeresis, and letter-Ü: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9C
Well you've just nerd-sniped me. I can't resist adding this bit of hyper-specific knowledge: it is called a tittle.
Conceptually umlaut dots are different from trema dots, but who cares?
Unicode also makes a difference, but generally recommends the merged character.
This is incorrect, from a linguistic perspective, but it's absolutely the case that if I asked 10 of my friends to describe Ä, 9 of them would say "'A' with an umlaut".
The vernacular not matching expert terms of art never ceases to annoy people, but it's not really worth fighting, I don't think.
Absolutely.
Yet it's hardly a secret either and something you would expect someone who graduated university writing for a relatively well known newspaper to be able to get right. It's trivial to most readers of English whether they got it right, sure. It's also trivial to get it right and they did not. It looks bad and casts bad light on the newspaper for accuracy and getting details correct. Needless to say there are plenty of details that may not be as trivial to get right but are non-trivial in their effect of your understanding of the story. How does something as batshit simple as this winding up smeared on the WSJ's face in such a nothing story affect the readers' estimate of how often they get important details wrong? That assessment is up to each reader but I'm pretty sure we can all agree it probably doesn't help much.
Basically thingiverse for furniture.
It would be awesome to be able to customize and reorder parts. For novice users, parametric models could be used to perfectly fit your closet in some nook.
I know there are fully automatic wood cnc machines, but I’m not aware of any company that offers this service (at a reasonable price of course).
Look around for small wood shops. My father owned one and had a Northwood with two 4x8 tables and 4 spindles. Mostly for in-house work but did a bunch of job shopping if someone came to him with decent drawings. A lot of work was one table so the other could be quickly setup for a one off.
Disposable furniture is the antithesis of "environmentally friendly."
> If people are happy with a cardboard coffee table, seems like a win.
I had one once, and I was not happy with it (a Lack). It literally disintegrated after about a year. People often push against a coffee table when sitting on a sofa, and it was not designed for those forces and came apart at the seams.
Just get some cheap metal brackets and attach them to the underside of the table and the legs. Especially if you have a white Lack, you can paint the bracket and screws white and the table will still look nice.
And this would make it, dunno, $40 for the table and $5 for the screws and brackets.
Lacks are notoriously sturdy for their "cardboardness". People literally turn their Lacks into server racks, they're that sturdy.
I put my feet up against it.
> Lacks are notoriously sturdy for their "cardboardness". People literally turn their Lacks into server racks, they're that sturdy.
I'd believe that, but a server on top of it wouldn't put any lateral forces on it. My experience is it can't stand lateral forces.
disposible furniture isnt environmentally friendly though. if you want a cheap item of furniture for short term use, get one second hand.
Having said this, I got my first Billy bookcase 15 years ago, it's still going strong with the more recent additions. So they don't have to be disposable items.
Could still get accessories for the inside of this stuff though, which definitely isn't nothing.
IKEA kitchens are actually one of the best things they sell. Their hardware lasts decades and finishes are very sturdy
And at that point... how much furniture do you really need? Does it really need to follow you to your grave?
Wish I had never sold the Jerker desk from 20 years ago. It was built like a tank.
They used to crop up on craigslist occasionally for $100-$200. not checked in a while.
TFA states that the white Billy was already built the "new" way. It's only the mock-woodgrain one that's changing to catch up.
Also, all their packaging seems to be recyclable - including their food packaging. That’s something supermarkets in the UK aren’t even close to
https://vermontwoodsstudios.com/
https://hedgehousefurniture.com
https://www.57thstreetbookcase.com/ (all bookcases, some veneer and plywood)
https://www.spekeklein.com/home
https://roomandboard.com (mix of solid and veneer, some MDF)
These makers are in a league of their own, very expensive, incredibly beautiful hand-made pieces:
https://www.sammaloofwoodworker.com
https://www.thosmoser.com (highly recommended)
https://nakashimawoodworkers.com (new commissions around $7K-$15K for a coffee table, $20K-40K for dining table, plus shipping; older Nakashima pieces are highly valued in the art world and sell anywhere between $15K-$300K)
https://www.wright20.com/search/nakashima/items#past
Edit: Also, to echo what someone mentioned below, if you're interested in solid wood furniture you should find a local woodworker.
Another edit and thought: I used to own a lot of IKEA furniture and as I've gotten older, have slowly replaced those pieces with items from Knoll, with custom pieces from local woodworkers, with a few pieces from the studios listed above. A lot of people are commenting on the cost, and yes they're expensive and could be considered luxury goods.
But if you like art and design and you care about quality, you save for what you want to buy. I wanted to be surrounded by great craftsmanship, so instead of buying "stuff" and instead of spending money on lots of subscriptions and services, or constantly upgrading phones and computers, I buy one piece of nice furniture every year. I believe the more you appreciate the things around you, the more they begin to influence your own work, and your sense of place.
I regularly see a lot of IKEA furniture on the side of the road and in dumpsters. I think this is the difference between buying "things" and having "possessions" but that's a discussion for another day.
The sort-of format is "Article title", article URL, URL to HN discussion or comment of interest, keywords or phrases that help grepping, newline after each line. I then use a simple grep script called looklink that just does a grep -ni $1 $home/doc/links/*
Why this route? Bookmarking in a browser doesn't let me add context and metadata to the URL the where a flat text file lets me do that. Plus I have to put in effort to add the link so you wind up with more focused and interesting links instead of a bunch of crap you thought you might be interested in. Meanwhile you cand find the actual link you want because there's no real metadata with it.
Especially true for those of us living in apartments and moving residences every 3-4 years
that doesn't mean people can stay in the same place long term, but if you're going to be there for 10+ years it might make sense to buy. yeah yeah i get no one can do that in SF or London, but plenty of HN posters who aren't in those cities.
Too funny.
It's more complicated than that but it's basically how it works in normal conversation
When I was renting, I could expect a 10-15% increase year to year. With the current average apartment cost being $1700, that can mean paying an additional $500-$800 per month after 3 years. At that point it becomes worth it to look elsewhere.
Used furniture is a weird market because it's hard to match buyers and sellers. But for whatever reason people seek out IKEA stuff. I've never had a problem moving it and have generally been happy with the prices I get
It is probably a lot easier to acquire a set of used Ikea furniture that matches reasonably well, than doing it with the random stuff that gets out there.
Not to mention when people need only one thing from IKEA, some will pay a premium to get it from down the street versus driving to IKEA.
Unlike virtually all other brands, IKEA enables you to purchase additional parts years or even decades down the line. Instead of searching for a second-hand cabinet which 100% matches your needs, you just look for something which is close enough and buy a few additional shelves and door handles new.
What the hell are you doing with your Ikea furniture ? I have stuff going towards twenty years, no problem.
I’ve also seen many packing mistakes (like two right sides of an armchair and no left side being packed) and similar in the UK that I never encountered around the Baltics/Nordics. I think a lot depends on the work and business culture in the region, as I’ve noticed more emphasis on quality in a lot of things in Scandinavia.
Left them in a sandbox with a feather and an anvil and came back to half the anvil and feathers spread around everywhere.
While sarcasm, never underestimate how insanely destructive children are.
I have a sofa I bought in 2005. I keep thinking I'll replace it after my next move, but even after several since then, it barely shows a fraction of its age (though I will admit a lack of kids or pets has likely helped).
I also bought an ottoman at some point after the sofa. It never looked great to start with, and I threw it out before the first move.
I have a desk of similar vintage to the sofa. I'm typing at it right now. I think I've been in offices with contract-grade furniture less durable than it.
I bought two different Ikea dressers over the years. One I didn't bother taking with me on the first move; the other is still holding up great several moves later.
Imagine how much hardwood you'd suddenly have to cut down if everyone started buying these instead of IKEA furniture.
You can use the price as a rough proxy for resource consumption. In my experience IKEA furniture lasts a good fraction of a lifetime. You can buy several for the price of one of these solid wood furniture, and I think you can also buy several before the resource impact is the same as well.
I'm honestly quite impressed with the engineering they're doing with cardboard these days. We have a coffee table and two wall shelves mounted below a TV.. and we have kids. They get treated badly, and they can take it. I hope to replace the coffee table with something nicer one day, but the IKEA one can get a second life in the basement.
The only thing I would have wished was solid wood is our dining table. The veneer is a bit damaged from moisture or heat. If it was solid wood we could've sanded and treated it.
I think the sustainable thing is a combination of IKEAs approach and solid wood. Every solid wood furniture bought will hopefully reduce the amount of trees we cut down over the long term, if they're well taken care of. Eventually it'll reduce the amount of IKEA-style furniture that has to be made. But right now that the population is still growing so much, and we need so much new furniture for new households, I suspect the best thing is to use the fastest growing wood and use as little as possible of it in the furniture.
Try the IKEA JOKKMOKK. Made with solid pine and stained with clear lacquer. https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/jokkmokk-table-and-4-chairs-ant...
I'll buy used.
Then you need to see some samples of what they've done.
And I imagine most can't show you 3D mockups of the end result.
Skilled carpenters charge a lot more.
A bar stool will probably run you at $1000. Consider that mass produced chairs are like $100-200 a piece from IKEA.
I'm not sure if that's true. My impression is that furniture has always been very expensive, and it's only fairly recently (mid-20th century?) that mass manufacturing has enabled it to be cheap, with IKEA being one of the most well-known examples.
but yeah cheap furniture, like in the "couple hundred of dollars" sense is pretty new.
150+ years ago life was different and spending a week planing a tabletop was not a waste of time.
You could eat the abundant animals, drink the clean water, and enjoy an entire life without ever once imbibing microplastics and PFAS.
It might have been a lot of work - but it was completely free. Those times are long gone, and it doesn't seem likely they'll ever return -- but that is how we lived for the vast majority of our time as human beings.
YOu probably live with hot and cold water, that you can drink... and pretty much everyone in the developed world can afford a banana... that kind of "luxury" wasn't available to kings just 200 years ago.
But that's all off topic.
The statement I was responding to claimed that humans could never afford nice furniture. But we've had axes for 1.6 million years, and abundant old-growth forests for 1.6 million years, and so, for the vast, vast, vast majority of human history we have in fact had the ability to make sturdy, beautiful, long lasting furniture completely for free.
The middle ages and the "dark" ages weren't even all that bad. They had more free time than we did. They had far more birds and beasts. They paid less taxes. They didn't have a multi-billion dollar ad industry telling them they're not good enough. They lived with nature, a nature we'll never know.
Yes, there was the war and the religious craziness and the fear of apocalypse - wait a minute, we still have all of that stuff except the fear of apocalypse is way more legit now.
I love modern plumbing, and many aspects of the internet. I love the access to culture and knowledge. Antibiotics are cool. I'd rather live now than then. But the idea that people 500; 5,000; or 500,000 years ago had nasty lives far inferior to our own is not entirely justified.
Again though - that's all off topic. Those guys 500,000 years ago had free housing, free wood to burn, and incredible biodiversity which we'll never be able to appreciate in our world of modern anthropocene extinction. And, probably, really nice furniture; if they wanted to make it.
Again... Go visit and Egyptological museum. Go see how rough, compared to modern furniture, the royal masterpiece chairs were.
For the 1599950 out of 1600000 years humans definitely could not afford or had any nice furniture. Absolute majority couldn't afford even rough sturdy, unnice furniture. And your comment about "free housing" is naive... It wasn't free and desirable places had their own issues.
Taking a dump on companies like IKEA is very much the most condescending thing we could do. I certainly have experienced the inability to purchase even the most basic necessities, where IKEA would have provided some relief.
Nor did I speak of comfort. Nor did GP.
Perhaps you are taking context from elsewhere in the comments and misapplying it to this little thread?
I spoke of beauty and sturdiness and longevity; nature, biodiversity.
I've been to many museums; I've seen the thrones. Roughness doesn't matter when you're putting cushions on, or when your buns are tough from years without sitting on padded chairs.
Your definition of nice furniture is very different from mine, clearly. I suggest that you might try to see things from a broader perspective.
On your other points:
Egypt wasn't known for its abundant forests - I don't know why you would expect great carpentry. Their cushions won't be in the museum, for what I hope are obvious reasons.
You cannot seriously claim only the furniture of the last 50 years is nice, while excoriating me for my lack of knowledge of how ancient people lived. Go read some descriptions of Sumerian furniture.
And yes, if you take your stone axe in 1.5 million BC, and clear a space, and build a house, it's free. Hard work - as I said - but free. No property taxes, no mortgage. Free. No HOA, no building standards... Free. There's nothing "naive" about that. What's patently naive is this insistence that only modern people have any sense of craftsmanship or comfort or quality - I say that because it's true, and you need to hear it; not to flame.
Which is quite misguided, as you still can go to many places on this planet where literally all of what you wrote is true.
There are vast swathes of land on this planet, where you can go and do exactly what our great ancestors did 1mil years ago.
Not to mention that your whole opinion rests on the notion that labor is free.
You'll be eating microplastics, drinking polluted water, and enjoying a far smaller spread of biodiversity. As I said.
There is nowhere on Earth that you can escape those facts any more. Microplastics and PFAs are on Mt Everest, and the Mariana Trench, and everywhere in between; and the Anthropocene Extinction is a real thing.
I also explicitly pointed out the labor involved, so I don't understand why you keep calling that out like some sort of gotcha.
Any luck researching Sumerian furniture? Nice, innit?
Step one: invent iron tools roughly 500,000 years early.
"Really nice furniture" involves a lot more than the easy availability of big chunks of wood. Paying a skilled craftsman to spend time to work on something is fundamentally expensive. That expense speaks to what the person you initially replied to was talking about vis a vis mass manufacturing.
Stone can chop wood.
Really nice furniture can also be defined as solid, old-growth wood furniture, designed and made to your own specifications, that will last for hundreds of years.
There are a looooot of people, especially craftsmen, who can appreciate heavy and well built, if rough, furniture. Even if it's worked with primitive tools, that stuff looks and smells and lasts better than anything - anything from IKEA. Especially when it's made with not just nice but gorgeous wood - mahogony, rosewood, oak, teak, etc. The stuff you can hardly buy for any money these days.
And no, I'm not "deliberately missing the economic point" - I'm adding the perspective of a wider range of human history than the last 50 years. The perspective of >99.99% of human history. For all that time, such furniture was not just cheap but free + labour. The trees were abundant, and we used them.
As for being insistent, I'm not - you can believe whatever you like - but it would be cool if you stopped trying to put the worst possible take on my words.
Your words are... really something. I feel like as an exercise, you should go try to make something useful out of a downed tree (find a good one!) with chips of flint and obsidian and at the end of the process show people the beautiful thing you made. Let them know how long it took, and how that time and effort ought to be considered "inexpensive."
You don't carve it with "chips" you know - you use a knife... Or an axe. Such as the one I mentioned, explicitly. Multiple times now.
But those trees are extremely hard to find now; illegal to chop down, in most parts of the west. We already cut down the vast, vast, vast majority of them. I've said that at least 3 times.
Yes, my words are something - maybe you could read them? You never know, you might learn something.
...
Do you think people didn't use furniture until we had cities? Spoiler: We sure did.
Do you think the only reason neolithic people spent hours knapping knives and axes was for fun / murder? It wasn't. They made stuff.
You think those people sat on the dirt their whole lives? Nope. We know this, because we have surviving examples of stone furniture - usually where wood was scarce...
Do you still think craftspeople don't appreciate solid wood furniture? ... They do. Ask them.
Or that all craftspeople would prefer the composite pine of an IKEA piece? Or that the IKEA piece would last longer? Nah. Not even close.
...
For well over a million years of our history, we had plenty of time to sit by the roaring fire, carving things and telling stories, singing songs. It wasn't all ooga-booga in caves you know.
And while we did this, making things, we got real good at it. We had damn near the exact same brain. It's rather arrogant, and ignorant, to think that those things they made were garbage compared to an IKEA POANG... You don't really think that, do you?
We have pictures, carved in stone, of furniture from 2500 years ago. It kicks ass - it's gorgeous. Nothing in IKEA compares, either in ornamentation or build quality.
> Let them know how long it took, and how that time and effort ought to be considered "inexpensive."
My brother in crust, I've explained at least 4 times now, including in the original comment, that I was using the word free as in free + labour. You can't keep trying to beat me with that stick; it's silly.
You're arguing for "how great it was a million years go". And I can place a good bet, that you had zero experience with woodworking... let alone green woodworking.
Maybe I’m too young (I don’t think so, I’m 32), but I have been impressed with how long some of my IKEA pieces have held up. Since IKEA products are so easy to disassemble and often modular, they are easy to buy and sell. I’ve bought countless used IKEA items over the years and sold nearly as many. These products are perfect for people who constantly move or have changing needs.
IKEA does not make throw-away furniture.
These kinds of pieces are generational purchases. They do save you money but on a very long timescale that you yourself likely won't realize.
The right furniture is timeless.
I see a lot of "timeless" pieces donated on our town's "Buy Nothing" facebook page, after failing to sell at estate sales.
The other one has an E27 fitting and fits a regular IKEA or Philips LED bulb, even the smart ones or the ones with temperature adjustments.
You're not going to save money by replacing your Ikea furniture with handcrafted wood furniture that's 25 times the price. Whenever you move, it'll cost more to move the nice chair. You'll eventually have to reupholster it. You'll need to find other hardwood furniture to match it. It'll be way way more expensive over it's lifetime.
The furniture looks and feels nicer to us, was made with thoughtfulness, and is unique, and that's why people buy it, not because it saves money.
> Whenever you move, it'll cost more to move the nice chair
> You'll need to find other hardwood furniture to match it.
Hahahaha. Bro, how rich you think I am? The desk I have is currently sitting next to an Ikea bookshelf, it looks fine. I moved it by putting it in the back of my friend's truck. I'm never selling it so a few scratches are fine.
[1] https://lostartpress.com/products/the-anarchists-design-book
presumably added at the bottom because people were expecting to download it for free...
Other caveat being high quality furniture rarely last a life time, restoration / repair can cost more than normal furniture. Another consideration is some luxury furniture / design pieces don't perform that well to heavy every day wear. There's a lot of pieces in big homes / spaces that gets very occasional use.
New home means new furniture, and if the old furniture doesn’t fit the new home’s style then sorry, it’s out and something else replaces it.
The idea of people living in the same house for 30-50 years is dead. IKEA understands this, so they create furniture that lasts the average length of a mortgage.
It's surrounded by Ikea stuff that will be thrown away when we move next.
From what I understand this is a part of why Ikea's furniture has such wide appeal. You had a hand in building it, so you have some attachment to it.
Buy it for life is right. I've inherited plenty of buy it for life furniture from family and friends, had some repaired and refinished, bought others off craigslist or estate sales etc, some are on their last legs or are too special to be anything but an heirloom as opposed to usable furniture. Of course things don't stay beautiful forever without care; kids (myself included, I damaged some nice furniture when little) are probably the most destructive force.
I still go back and forth (have a need for bookshelves right now) between the price tiers of Ikea's Billy, local used sales, and new wood furniture. But I've never regretted buying something nice.
They are luxury goods.
We know well that melamine board furniture lasts a lifetime, and there's little need to have a $15k coffee table. Getting a local woodworker to build you anything larger than a pair of side tables is thousands of dollars, without even the material costs.
Your whole comment is a little detached from reality and reads very condescending.
I really wish that Ikea would offer a sub-brand which is more premium. They did that many years ago. I have a dresser from the early '90s which is still in good shape. It was differentiated by design. materials and construction. It also cost a lot more than other similar items. Around that same time they sold a series of shelves/cabinets with aluminum extrusions for the corners, and some of their more dense particle board with premium veneers for the shelves/panels. It really competed with high end stuff from other contract furniture companies like Steelcase, Knoll, and Herman Miller.
Ikea no longer seems to be interested in competing on quality.
I’d never buy furniture from them. Just smaller things like glasses and plants. They’re a shadow of what they used to be.
It's designed in such a way now that if you use it slightly outside of parameters it's fucked. Like, pick up a chest of drawers the wrong way and the particleboard snaps in a way that is impossible to fix properly without replacing the entire beam.
Try and screw something to the side of a Kallax or whatever, it's honeycomb cardboard so screws just fall through. Yeah you can do it with a bit of effort, but I mean, meh.
I don't think that square items of furniture like that should be disposable. You should be able to just cut it up and use the scrap wood for other projects. Even if you don't want to, leave it outside your flat or house on a dry day, someone will.
I cannot even give it away, sell it or recycle it. Considering making my own stuff eventually.
They've never been conspicuously or indulgently expensive but they've never been the cheapest option in a given class. And that has been a key part of their success in the North American market.
The parallel to the furniture market isn't so cut and clear but Ikea does not generally compete with the big box stores on the lowest end FWIW.
Fine tuning quality, feature and price points for their products to attract or repel various customer demographics is something big brands spend a lot of effort on.
They are over the long run. It's a lot like Apple hardware. Slightly more expensive at first, but massively better resale value and durability, resulting in a much lower total cost of ownership. This is basically just the "cheap boots" paradox though, so people instead buy Hyundai/Kia based on the sticker price.
Except that Toyota vehicles can take a lot of neglect and keep on going.
Ikea furniture can definitely be moved.
Eg. Buy a Hemnes bookcase instead of a Billy. A ton more affordable than a custom walnut or oak bookcase from a local furniture maker if that is out of your price range, but will last practically as long.
Here's a book review of their "Democratic Design" book in which they discuss trying to fulfil 5 design paramaters,
Form, function, quality, price and sustainability:
https://uxdesign.cc/ikea-democratic-design-3-design-takeaway...
There’s your problem right there. We are all getting a worse product from IKEA because they have to keep investors profits up.
They wrap this boot to the face in a lovingly quaint “scrappy engineers” story that’s supposed to make it seem like this is all unavoidable effects of some mysterious process.
We’re the authors of our own hell folks.
I’m pretty sure Inter-IKEA has private shareholders
The latest one I assmeled used plastic locking mechanisms to keep the shelves in place instead of the metal of all my prior bookcases. Probably good enough, but doesn't inspire confidence.
Do you disagree with my assessment? I can go take pictures of my individual bookshelves if you would like and show the gradual drop in quality if you would prefer.
Less wood, less metal, more plastic, less material. Cost cutting at every point.
I have a Besta Casefeom 2018 that was made with 1mm wood veneer and it looks decent. The pins where the shelf rest are made from metal and some screws are also metal.
The 2022 version has paper foil printed to look like wood, the pins are plastic, the screws too. IT IS ABSOLUT TRASH! Literally.
The foil is so bad, you will scratch it of accidentally with your fingernails, the plastic screws are one time use only, maybe twice. The pins are bending without any weight on it. I returned it.
They look nearly the same, cost the same as 2018, but they are different. Be warned.
Not necessarily. The GNEDBY is an almost identical version of the BENNO, except that the shelves mount differently on the GNEDBY. I bought two GNEDBY shelves used (since they stopped making them) and when was setting it up, I discovered that one of them was slightly different from my four GNEDBYs. Turns out that it was a BENNO all along.
(This take not backed up by any data, just my opinion.)
The free market apparently gives you cardboard furniture at mid-range prices or custom built furniture that non-1% earners wouldn't even dream of affording, and not much inbetween.
$2700 dresser? No thanks.
The "reasonable" option is buying second-hand solid wood furniture on Craigslist and thrift stores in the ~$500-700 range.
Try lifting your old Kallax vs the new one. No, you are not suddenly turned into Captain America. It's the new Kallax that's suddenly became so light and hollow.
Their default desk depth is now a mere 60 cm because everyone aparently use laptops on desks, nowadays. Ugh. Anything with more depth than that -> so much costlier.
I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did! It broke in the third apartment, so it survived two moves. And it was just $15 to replace.
I suspect this comes from having been assembled by an engineer and not the average [insert mechanically unqualified archetype here for flamewar].
For decorating reasons that I cannot explain, I periodically disassemble some pieces and store them for future reintroduction after painting or some other visual adjustments without issue, keeping in mind that all those little metal bits must be stored in a bag and tie-wrapped to the kit.
I find a certain elegance in the austere design simplicity and construction but recognize it may not be to everyone's preferred taste. Like most objects around us, IKEA products have potential for good or evil, depending upon the user's intent and usage.
"IKEA grew into a furniture behemoth with a relentless focus on keeping costs low, but that goal has become more challenging. The price of metal, glass, wood and plastic have spiraled up, as have shipping costs. Inflation has squeezed consumers’ wallets. Managers at IKEA knew that something had to change to keep prices down and profits up, so in the past couple of years they have taken some of their products back to the drawing board."
This explains why the nicer Ikea furniture you purchased 15 years ago is of a much higher quality than what is built today.
I was somewhat shocked that there were multiple assembly systems being delivered this year even amongst those iconic products. Chiefly, one type has nail-pinned back, and one type has a plastic pressure-pinned back. AFAIK the nail-pin system is older and ... it is shit. The plastic-pinned system is new and far better. Why?
People will hammer themselves. Nails can be easily lost. Hammers aren't always available to consumers. Neighbours hate hammering noises, and many people now live in close proximity to strangers in apartments. CNC cut holes are always in the right place. Plastic pressure pins can be taken out if the furniture needs to be disassembled for relocation.
I admire Ikea industrial design and consider assembly of their products an educational experience because, having spent a lot of time in the past half-decade with mechanical design responsibility also spanning production process engineering and associated logistics, Ikea stuff is just so damn practical. IMHO Ikea products and their associated documentation are proof that design improvement remains possible... even for "iconic" designs that are the back-stop of their brand.
That said, I strongly dislike their stores.
I've seen them produced by others but would hazard a guess Ikea was one of the earlier users if not the origin of the design.
Here is a discussion of it - https://www.core77.com/posts/27725/Death-to-Cam-Lock-Nuts-Fl... - apparently incorrectly suggesting it will be partly replaced with this system - https://www.core77.com//posts/59321/How-Ikeas-New-Joinery-is...
The part of the allegedly proposed evolution which is not obvious to non-production engineers is that the milled voids within the proposed table interior are only possible to achieve with angled CNC work which is not something Ikea has traditionally done as it is historically PITA. You can basically only do it cheaply with custom milling robotics, which is only feasible on production at a certain (not huge but decent) scale. Specifically you probably want to have a fixed angle of approach and the capacity to rotate the mill's work-head by 90 degree increments (as this is faster, more energy efficient, and more spatially efficient than rotating the workpiece itself). Then simply mill the same feature four times. The alternative is rotating the workpiece on a huge rotary table and using a standard mill, but that requires angled mounting and de-mounting of the workpiece which is a PITA requiring equipment (eg. a robotic arm) itself.
Production cost, part count and user experience wise this is brilliant design enabled primarily by innovation in fabrication automation. Kudos to Ikea's prototyping team. However, marketing wise a fat, relatively unstable table with zero drawers may be a hard sell and hard to differentiate branding wise from a straight clone.
It seems the design made it to market but with some kind of odd-ball manually hex key driven cog-as-screw-proxy system as per the video here: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/lisabo-coffee-table-ash-veneer-...
The primary benefit of that system appears to be stability in disassembly and re-assembly (in some ways this is "furniture for the homeless", a very millennial design proposition). In addition, I'd hazard a guess brand differentiation was another high priority concern in the eventual decision to go to market with this oddball cog system, since AFAIK a factory-mounted thread insert and a countersunk screw would have been easier and probably cheaper, yet rapidly cloned.
[1]: https://www.epa.gov/indoor-air-quality-iaq/volatile-organic-...