This seemed like the perfect solution. Made from durable and recyclable polyolefin plastic, the chair and sofa designs can be inflated at home using simply a hair dryer. Transport volume will be reduced by up to 90 percent. Sadly, Ikea’s ambitions waned only after the “Air” collection launched in the 2000 catalogue.
Store employees said the easy chairs and sofas looked like a group of “swollen hippos” in a furniture display. Customer forgot to cool down his hair dryer before filling with air. Hot air takes up more space than cool air, so essentially sofas deflate when the air inside gets cold. Worse, the valves leaked, so after sitting down, an unpleasant farting sound started coming from your general direction. By 2013, Ikea had phased out the air collection, but it had importantly learned several lessons.
Fast forward to the present day and now Mikael Axelsson is the intrepid Ikea designer who has decided to give blow-up furniture another try for the brand’s latest PS collection, launching on May 13. However, their $200 inflatable armchair, called (somewhat uninspiredly) the “PS 2026 Easy Chair,” has had a strange birth compared to any other of the 2,000 products Ikea releases each year. To start, he’s been sitting on this particular idea for 12 years, when he initially created a Barbie-sized mock-up out of foam and wire in 2014 — just a year after the original Air collection imploded.
At the time, the problem wasn’t just that Axelson struggled to figure out how to make an inflatable cushion more like foam and less like a beach ball; Ikea was also wary of returning so soon to the flatulence problem that was the failure of its inflatable furniture. So his model was literally locked in his office. Then, in 2023, Axelsson and the rest of the in-house team were called upon to create innovative designs for the upcoming PS collection, and they got the chance to breathe life back into their inflatable easy chair concept.
Deciding to stick with his original tubular chrome frame idea, Axelsson hand-welded 20 prototypes himself, a skill he had acquired from growing up around his father’s metal workshop, but the problem of the beach ball remained.
“I remember when Mikael met this guy who repairs tractor tires, and he came in with a tractor inner tube,” Johan Ajdemo, Ikea’s global design manager, told me. They put him on a concept chair. Better, but not perfect. Eventually, he came up with the idea of a double-chamber seat. “It’s an outer air section, and then a central air section,” says Ajdemo. “And you can control the comfort yourself, depending on how much you turn it up.”
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