TRUTH.
For a stretch of the early 21st century, the most widely distributed printed document on Earth was not a religious text, a government publication, or a literary classic. It was a furniture catalog from a Swedish company that most people couldn't pronounce correctly until the 1990s. At its peak in 2016, IKEA printed 200 million copies of its annual catalog in 32 languages across more than 50 countries. Global Bible printing in the same period ran to approximately 100 million copies per year — roughly half.
The first IKEA catalog was assembled by founder Ingvar Kamprad himself in 1951. It was 68 pages long, printed in Swedish, and distributed to 285,000 households in southern Sweden.Wikipedia's catalog entry notesthat by 2013, IKEA was printing approximately 208 million copies annually — more than double global Bible output that year. The catalog was consuming roughly 70% of IKEA's entire annual marketing budget by 2004, a figure that reflected a deliberate strategic choice to own the channel rather than rent space in someone else's.
Each edition took approximately ten months to develop and ran to over 300 pages featuring around 12,000 products.Different versions were produced for different markets, with regional adjustments for kitchen sizes, cultural norms, and product availability. The 2012 Saudi Arabian edition was quietly edited to remove women from all photographs — a decision that generated significant controversy when discovered.
In December 2020, IKEA announced it would discontinue the catalogafter 70 years, citing the shift to online shopping. The 2021 edition was the last. At its end, it was still reaching over 200 million households.
Seventy years of furniture. More reach than the Bible. And nobody ever read the whole thing.
The first IKEA catalog was assembled by founder Ingvar Kamprad himself in 1951. It was 68 pages long, printed in Swedish, and distributed to 285,000 households in southern Sweden.Wikipedia's catalog entry notesthat by 2013, IKEA was printing approximately 208 million copies annually — more than double global Bible output that year. The catalog was consuming roughly 70% of IKEA's entire annual marketing budget by 2004, a figure that reflected a deliberate strategic choice to own the channel rather than rent space in someone else's.
Each edition took approximately ten months to develop and ran to over 300 pages featuring around 12,000 products.Different versions were produced for different markets, with regional adjustments for kitchen sizes, cultural norms, and product availability. The 2012 Saudi Arabian edition was quietly edited to remove women from all photographs — a decision that generated significant controversy when discovered.
In December 2020, IKEA announced it would discontinue the catalogafter 70 years, citing the shift to online shopping. The 2021 edition was the last. At its end, it was still reaching over 200 million households.
Seventy years of furniture. More reach than the Bible. And nobody ever read the whole thing.
