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IKEA Is Killing Off Its Catalog After 70 Years (cnn.com) 60

Posted by BeauHD from the fun-while-it-lasted dept.
After 70 years in publication, Ikea is ending both the print and digital versions of its annual catalog, citing the increasing shift to online browsing and shopping. "Turning the page with our beloved catalog is in fact a natural process since media consumption and customer behaviors have changed," said Konrad Grüss, an Ikea executive, in a statement. "In order to reach and interact with the many people, we will keep inspiring with our home furnishing solutions in new ways." CNN reports: The first Ikea catalog was released in Swedish in 1951. The first dual-version (online and in print) was released in 2000 and, at its peak in 2016, Ikea printed 200 million copies in 32 languages in 50 markets. âThe 2021 catalog, released in October, will be the final version. Next year, Ikea will release a smaller book that will be "filled with great home furnishing inspiration and knowledge" and celebrates the catalog's history.
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IKEA Is Killing Off Its Catalog After 70 Years More

IKEA Is Killing Off Its Catalog After 70 Years

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  • Sure, good idea (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TWX ( 665546 ) on Monday December 07, 2020 @08:33PM (#60805140)

    Let's see. Montgomery Ward's ended it's catalog. It closed. Sears ended its catalog, it's just about to close.

    I shop through Grainger relatively often. I have one of their catalogs from a couple years back. Often it's much easier to use the catalog to find like-items, similar items, cross-referencing items, compatible items, etc. When laying-out a print catalog, the copy-editor can insert blurbs with sets of items describing compatability in ways that seem to not be common in web-order catalogs.

    • but now online is ready Now sears may of been better waiting a few years an then going online.

    • Re:Sure, good idea (Score:5, Insightful)

      by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Monday December 07, 2020 @08:41PM (#60805176)

      Often it's much easier to use the catalog to find like-items,

      But who wants ease of use? You need to jump through hoops, multiple pages, have sixty tabs open and cycle through different sized pictures with different layouts and descriptions to really get the goods. Ease of use is for chumps. You gotta make your customers work for it.

      • LOL amateur. You want a real challenge, walk through an IKEA store with your wife. You'll be begging not only to have those 60 tabs back, but you'll be wishing you were using Edge.

        • "LOL amateur. You want a real challenge, walk through an IKEA store with your wife. "

          It's doable, you just have to put a blindfold on the wife for the last part of the shop, where the glassware, the pans and silverware, the bath and beyond stuff and decorations are displayed or your car will be too small.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The IKEA website is particularly bad for this. The way stuff is organized is completely nonsensical and it's hard to find anything. The search function is broken in some strange way and item pages recommend random unrelated things but rarely other items in the same range.

        Coupled with the odd names they give things (are they Swedish or made up?) it's a real pain to find what you want.

        They have terrible version control too, took me 6 attempts to get a missing screw I needed. Finally realized that I could modi

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rhipf ( 525263 )

          The way stuff is organized is completely nonsensical and it's hard to find anything. The search function is broken in some strange way and item pages recommend random unrelated things but rarely other items in the same range.

          I find this to be the case with most web sites and search results. Go to Amazon and search for LED light bulb and you will get everything from screwdriver to a basket of oranges and somewhere in there may be an LED light bulb. *

          *ok might not be quite that bad but is it really that hard to make search result relevant to what you type in the search bar?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by whitroth ( 9367 )

        You forgot the lazy programming, where each time you refresh the page, say, if you're using noScript, there are still *more* links for scripts to allow or not.

      • Easy?

        last time i got an ikea catalog, I asked who in the house had ordered the lifetime supply of scrabble tiles . . .

        hawk

    • If they're ending the catalog then the sales from it are less than the cost of sending it out. That's it. It's not like it's hard to track catalog sales. Even the ones where you sent a catalog and they bought online or in store it's not hard to track.

      Catalog sales are the domain of old folks. And they're the only ones with any money in most economies (because wages for young folks have dropped like a rock, while the old folks are either retired with nice pensions or still working on pay scales from befo

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by ISayWeOnlyToBePolite ( 721679 )

        This might differ between countries, but around here you can only order in person at the store or online, there's no option to order by mail or telephone. The catalog is just advertising.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        If they're ending the catalog then the sales from it are less than the cost of sending it out. That's it. It's not like it's hard to track catalog sales. Even the ones where you sent a catalog and they bought online or in store it's not hard to track.

        Catalog sales are the domain of old folks. And they're the only ones with any money in most economies (because wages for young folks have dropped like a rock, while the old folks are either retired with nice pensions or still working on pay scales from before w

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by havana9 ( 101033 )
          Ikea catalogue doesn't have an order form. The catalogue is more of a presentation of their offers and ideas. Is the same for other furniture shops that need to make you go to the mall and look around, and like the example rooms they put in the mall, they build a reference situation. If you buy a complete kitchen you can't order by yourself because it has to be built up to code and other things the customers doesn't know. Having a customer see a photo on the catalogue ans thinking: this is a nice combinatio

    • have useful formats, the classic which survived online being McMaster-Carr whose company is a magnificent success story though MSC, Fastenal, Graiger etc are staples too.

      McMaster had a fortuitous format which translates naturally to online shopping such that generations of machinists, millwrights and their purchasing departments can easily navigate both. It is THE canonical human interface design example of how to get things right the first time in print and on the web. Industrial suppliers know how conveni

      • Anyone know of German equivalent to MrMaster-Carr by the way?

        It's rewlly annoying that we don't have anything like it.

      • Sears and Monkey Wards were run by luddites (who in Sears case wanted to end retail operations and sell off the land) while industrial suppliers have much different goals. Ikea always catered to a "modern" customer base so dumping the catalog makes perfect sense. Sears and MW catered to a traditionalist base and should have modernized but stupidly dropped the ball and good riddance.

        Oddly enough, Sears was the original Amazon with its catalogue. They had a vast array of items, from small household items to cars and houses, all of which was delivered to your door; or in case of a house with your door. Their failing was not seeing how to translate that model to an online model; and no doubt thought it would hurt their retail operation and thus failed to make the transition.

        It's a shame, as their Made in USA Craftsmen tools were very high quality at an affordable price and they stood be

        • Oddly enough, Sears was the original Amazon with its catalogue.

          Oddly enough, Mongomery Ward's was the original Amazon. Their founding predates that of Sears by twenty years. They died off just before the web became important for commerce, but their prices were not very good and so it's questionable whether they could have made the transition anyway, like Sears could have but didn't.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dcw3 ( 649211 )

            Nobody waited for the Monkey Wards catalog. The Sears catalog was gold though. Especially around Christmas.

            • Sears catalog consumers were mostly rural, and they probably got blown out by Walmart at that point.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by dcw3 ( 649211 )

                Walmart hadn't really spread until the 80s. As for Sears, sure catalog customers were mostly rural. But I guarantee you there was a Sears catalog in just about ever home in urban America through the 70s. I was in the Detroit area when the '75 catalog came out that the gals all gushed over...my mom and her best friend acted like school girls.

                • I was in the Detroit area when the '75 catalog came out that the gals all gushed over...my mom and her best friend acted like school girls.

                  What kind of consumer hell hole was Detroit back in '75??? There were still factory jobs there. The Japanese imports hadn't invaded the American markets yet. It was New York City that was hanging financially by a string. Detroit suburbs didn't have a Macy's or Sears? (Malls were really a Long Island thing, that far back.)

                  In the case of Walmart, I'm talking about its origins, the South. They were well entrenched by the 1970's and stuck to the strategy of moving only into rural markets, and squash the m

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by dcw3 ( 649211 )

                    There were plenty of malls, with Sears in nearly every one of them. Detroit had Eastland, Westland, and Northland. In the burbs, we had Lakeside and Oakland. Not to mention the big Hudson's and other stores downtown.

                    You seem to be missing the point of the catalog...home based window shopping before the Internet. Sure, you could go to the mall, but the mall didn't always carry everything you saw in the catalog. The kids could pick out their Christmas presents, and ogle the women's underwear section (we

        • Sears mail order business was probably dead by the 1990's. They would have needed to rebuild from scratch. Sears has also been owned/controlled by a predatory venture capital fund for a while. They're not about having the vision to build a business to compete with what Amazon was by 2009.

    • Montgomery Ward struggled for years before ending their catalog. Same for sears, Macy's, J C Penney, etc. These stores didn't make sufficient adjustments when newer chains lured people away with lower-priced merchandise. Their own reputations suffered as the level of their customer service gradually sank to the point that customers couldn't find someone to help them when they needed help. The disappearance of their catalogs had very little to do with their demise.

      • Re:Causation / correlation (Score:4, Informative)

        by Megane ( 129182 ) on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @01:14AM (#60805828)

        10-15 years ago I heard from a former employee that JCP's big mistake was to deprecate long-term sales employees in a short-sighted attempt to penny-pinch their payroll. Customer service didn't gradually sink, it nosedived as older employees were driven out, along with their knowledge.

        Sears was taken over by corporate raiders who were selling off their real-estate properties, and then (like happened to Toys R Us) having the company take on debt while cash was siphoned out.

    • I read many complaints re Ikeaâ(TM)s deliveries and customer service during COVID. I also did not find any of the items I wanted in stockâ"and they were not weird items, but staple ones. I no longer trust Ikea to fulfill my full furniture needs.

    • I shop through Grainger relatively often. I have one of their catalogs from a couple years back. Often it's much easier to use the catalog to find like-items, similar items, cross-referencing items, compatible items, etc. When laying-out a print catalog, the copy-editor can insert blurbs with sets of items describing compatability in ways that seem to not be common in web-order catalogs.

      Comparing Grainger to Ikea is... comparing apples to the thing least like apples you can imagine. (On top of the correlat

    • Let's see. Montgomery Ward's ended it's catalog. It closed. Sears ended its catalog, it's just about to close.

      And neither company had a primary sales method which involved getting people to walk through 3500 steps through their entire showroom just to get a 2x2 KALAX they saw online (guess where I was this weekend).

      Montgomery Ward and Sears relied heavily on the catalogue to advertise products. IKEA used the catalogue only to get it in people's minds that they may need to remodel their rooms, and there's plenty of other things that do that these days. IKEA is making over 20bn EUR profit every year. They're not goin

  • Now we have to pickle our own herring??

  • By getting rid of the catalog, IKEA will save a big chunk of change. The C-Suite and VP who made the decision will get a big bonus too. It looks so good on paper!

    Long after that VP has moved on or retired and the leadership has changed, years later the C-Suite will struggle with declining sales. They'll throw cash at more marketing, redesigned their website over and over, reduce staff, close stores, all without understanding the root cause. The C-Suite will even balk at suggestions of reintroducing the

    • They're probably planning way ahead, for when people can't afford real estate [fandom.com] any more and will just live in their self-driving RVs. I mean, with so much being digital, what do you really *have* to have in physical form nowadays that you can map to the monetary (not emotional) valuation of housing?

      • You meant rent self-driving RVs?

        Maybe the cars will negotiate among themselves and your assigned UBI provider, evicting and moving their residents among themselves

    • Funny one. :-)

      File under irony and truth categories.

      It looks so good on paper!

      Paper??! Careful with your words lest you be accused of heresy

    • "By getting rid of the catalog, IKEA will save a big chunk of change."

      Indeed, they printed over 300 millions of those suckers.

      I hope they still keep the pencils though.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • IKEA has a product lineup more suited to rapid revision of an online system. Basically, they sell stuff that fell off a truck. There is no way to keep a paper catalog current when they run out of something and often there is no hope of them ever carrying it again. No matter how popular it was.

    Catalog sales are more suited to stable product lines. Where people might want to return and buy more of the same. Even if it's not in the showroom, you can order it from a warehouse.

    • they sell stuff that fell off a truck

      That's a bold allegation. I don't suppose they'll notice or care about a slashdot post, but generally you shouldn't accuse companies (or people) of criminal activity without some pretty solid evidence.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        I've actually found some Chinese companies that make their product. It appears that they get one-time deals for a limited batch. Or they buy up some overproduction. Once that's gone, you never see that model in their showroom again.

        It's the same model that Costco uses. But Costco is honest about it. They have a limited supply from some manufacturer and when that's gone, its because it was a one-time deal at a low price. If they can't get that price again, they don't carry it any more.

        The 'fell off a truck

  • Oh man, no one is going to understand the Nanonwar Of Steel song anymore:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • They can use all of that inventory of paper previously used to make the catalog for making their quality furniture.

  • Sure, great, they won't have to pay a printed edition nor an editor to compose the document nor photographer for the photos, etc.

    And what about the less people who doesn't have a f*cking idea on how to use computers/mobiles?

    Well, you can go directly to the shop in the pandemic and search through their *small* number or products...

  • A massive disadvantage of displays: (Score:3)

    by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @07:08AM (#60806488)

    Lack of overview.

    I thought large 4K displays would solve that.

    But phones ruined it. Not only because you get zero overview on a phone. But also because websites seem to all be designed for phones, even when displaying them on a 4K 96DPI screen.

  • Are you listening, ULine? Enough with the thick catalogs that you send out multiple times every quarter. Oh, and I really don't give a damn about the free gifts if you buy a ton of boxes. Make the stuff less expensive and quit charging me extra for motor freight when it doesn't really weigh that much.

  • If you'd asked me, I would've guessed that Ikea was probably started sometime in the nineties.

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