A blow-up chair? Ikea has been right here earlier than. It tried to make inflatable furnishings within the mid-Nineties, when designer Jan Dranger got here to the Swedish firm with a revolutionary thought to unravel certainly one of its largest challenges: the best way to squish sofas into its most well-liked flat-pack format, simplifying transport and slicing prices.
It appeared like the proper answer. Created from sturdy and recyclable polyolefin plastic, the chair and couch designs might be inflated at house utilizing solely a hair dryer. Transport volumes could be minimize by as a lot as 90 p.c. Sadly, solely after the “a.i.r” assortment launched within the 2000 catalogue did Ikea’s ambitions grow to be deflated.
Workers in shops stated that the straightforward chairs and sofas regarded like teams of “swollen hippos” within the furnishings shows. Prospects forgot to set their hair dryers to chilly earlier than inflating. Scorching air takes up more room than chilly air, so inevitably the sofas deflated because the air inside cooled. Even worse, the valves leaked, so after sitting down, an unglamorous farting noise issued out of your normal course. By 2013, Ikea killed the a.i.r assortment, however it had crucially realized many classes.
Quick-forward to the current day and now Mikael Axelsson is the intrepid Ikea designer who has determined to offer blow-up furnishings one other strive for the model’s newest PS collection launching on Could 13. Nevertheless, his $200 inflatable armchair, known as (considerably uninspiringly) the “PS 2026 Straightforward Chair,” has had a stranger delivery than another of the two,000 merchandise Ikea releases annually. To begin, he is been sitting on this specific thought for 12 lengthy years after he initially customary a Barbie-sized mock-up from foam and wire in 2014—only one yr after the unique a.i.r assortment burst.
On the time, the difficulty was not merely that Axelsson struggled to determine the best way to make an inflatable cushion really feel extra like foam and fewer like a seaside ball; Ikea was additionally cautious of returning so quickly to the flatulent debacle that was its inflatable furnishings failure. So his mannequin was shelved, actually, in his workplace. Then, in 2023, Axelsson and the remainder of the in-house workforce had been summoned to drum up revolutionary designs for an upcoming PS assortment, and he noticed an opportunity to breathe life again into his inflatable simple chair idea.
Deciding to stay along with his authentic tubular chrome body thought, Axelsson hand-welded 20 prototypes himself, a ability acquired from rising up round his father’s metallic workshop, however the seaside ball downside remained.
“I bear in mind when Mikael met with this man who repairs tractor tires, and he got here with the interior tube of a tractor,” Johan Ejdemo, Ikea’s international design supervisor, tells me. They put that in an idea chair. Higher, however not excellent. Ultimately, they struck upon the concept of a dual-chamber seat. “It is one outer air part, after which one central air part,” Ejdemo says. “And you may regulate the consolation your self, relying on how a lot you pump it up.”
