A blow-up chair? Ikea has been here before. It attempted to make 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 squish sofas into its preferred flat-pack format, simplifying transport and cutting costs.
It sounded like the perfect solution. Made from durable and recyclable polyolefin plastic, the chair and sofa designs could be inflated at home using only a hair dryer. Transport volumes would be cut by as much as 90 percent. Sadly, only after the “a.i.r” collection launched in the 2000 catalogue did Ikea’s ambitions become deflated.
Staff in stores said that the easy chairs and sofas looked like groups of “swollen hippos” in the furniture displays. Customers forgot to set their hair dryers to cold before inflating. Hot air takes up more space than cold air, so inevitably the sofas deflated as the air inside cooled. Even worse, the valves leaked, so after sitting down, an unglamorous farting noise issued from your general direction. By 2013, Ikea killed the a.i.r collection, but it had crucially learned many 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, his $200 inflatable armchair, called (somewhat uninspiringly) the “PS 2026 Easy Chair,” has had a stranger birth than any other of the 2,000 products Ikea releases each year. To start, he’s been sitting on this particular idea for 12 long years after he initially fashioned a Barbie-sized mock-up from foam and wire in 2014—just one year after the original a.i.r collection burst.
At the time, the trouble was not merely that Axelsson struggled to figure out how to make an inflatable cushion feel more like foam and less like a beach ball; Ikea was also wary of returning so soon to the flatulent debacle that was its inflatable furniture failure. So his model was shelved, literally, in his office. Then, in 2023, Axelsson and the rest of the in-house team were summoned to drum up innovative designs for an upcoming PS collection, and he saw a chance to breathe life back into his inflatable easy chair concept.
Deciding to stick with his original tubular chrome frame idea, Axelsson hand-welded 20 prototypes himself, a skill acquired from growing up around his father’s metal workshop, but the beach ball problem remained.
“I remember when Mikael met with this guy who repairs tractor tires, and he came with the inner tube of a tractor,” Johan Ejdemo, Ikea’s global design manager, tells me. They put that in a concept chair. Better, but not perfect. Eventually, they struck upon the idea of a dual-chamber seat. “It’s one outer air section, and then one central air section,” Ejdemo says. “And you can regulate the comfort yourself, depending on how much you pump it up.”
