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Exploding chair? IKEA has been here before. It tried making inflatable furniture in the mid-1990s, when designer Jan Dranger came to the Swedish company with a revolutionary idea to solve one of its biggest challenges: how to crush sofas into its preferred flat packaging form, simplifying transportation and cutting costs.
It seemed like the perfect solution. Made from durable, recyclable polyolefin plastic, the chair and sofa designs can be blown up at home using just a hair dryer. Transport volumes will be reduced by up to 90 percent. It is unfortunate that it was only after the launch of the “Air” collection in the 2000 catalog that IKEA’s ambitions diminished.
Store workers said the comfy chairs and sofas looked like groups of “bloated hippos” in the furniture displays. Customers forgot to set hair dryers to cold before blowing. Hot air takes up more space than cold air, so sofas are sure to deflate when the air inside cools. What’s worse is that the valves leak, so after you sit down, an unattractive noise comes from your general direction. By 2013, IKEA had discontinued the Air range, but crucially it had learned many lessons.
Fast forward to the present day and now Mikael Axelsson He is the intrepid IKEA designer who decided to try out blown furniture again for the brand’s latest product PS group It will be launched on May 13. However, his $200 inflatable chair, called (somewhat uninspiringly) the “PS 2026 Easy Chair,” had a birth unlike any other of the 2,000 products IKEA launches each year. Initially, he had been thinking about this exact idea for 12 years after initially creating a Barbie-sized model out of foam and wire in 2014 — just one year after the original air set exploded.
At the time, the problem wasn’t just that Axelson was struggling to figure out how to make the inflatable pillow feel more like foam and less like a beach ball; IKEA was also wary of a return soon to the inflated disaster that was the inflatable furniture failure. So his model was shelved, literally, in his office. Then, in 2023, Axelson and the rest of the in-house team were called upon to crowdsource innovative designs for the upcoming PS range, and saw an opportunity to bring the inflatable easy chair concept to life.
Axelson decided to stick with his original idea of a tubular chrome frame, and hand-welded 20 prototypes himself, a skill he had picked up from growing up in his father’s metal shop, but the beach ball problem remained.
“I remember when Mikael met this guy who repairs tractor tires, and he came with the tractor inner tube,” Johan Ejdimo, IKEA’s global design director, tells me. They put that on the concept chair. Better, but not perfect. Eventually, they came up with the idea of a double seat. “It’s an external antenna section, and then a central antenna section,” Egdimu says. “And you can regulate the comfort level yourself, depending on how much you’re pumping.”