Ikea's New Blow-Up Chair Was Tested by Cats

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.”

The hair dryer solution has wisely been ditched in favor of a simple foot pump that comes with each PS Easy Chair, which will supposedly make such home self-adjustment a breeze. Another lesson learned from the early 2000s was that just putting a sheet cover over plastic can lead to—there's no other way to put this—unwanted sweatiness. So now a fiber layer sits on top of the inflatable seat, which not only adds to the comfort but, along with the deep emerald green fabric cover, mercifully stops any uncomfortable moistness.

I've sat in this chair, and it's a marvel. Axelsson and Ikea have achieved a level of comfort you don't expect from something you inflate with a foot pump. “Many have been sitting on this chair, and they haven't really reflected on that it's an inflatable product. So I think we have succeeded,” Ejdemo says. Then he shows me the chair's party trick: In one move, he lifts it above his head effortlessly using just one hand. Thanks to the tubular frame and air interior, the Easy Chair astonishingly weighs just 8 kilograms (around 18 pounds). By comparison, Ikea's Rocksjön chair weighs close to 20 kilograms (44 pounds). What's more, the box it comes in is just 6 inches thick, and you can carry it under your arm.

However, all of you cat owners out there know exactly what happens when felines are left alone with a good chair or sofa. Furniture miraculously morphs into scratching post nirvana. Considering Ikea has made a surprisingly comfortable armchair out of what is effectively a balloon, have cats tested the inflatable Easy Chair?

“Yes,” laughs Ejdemo. “Cats are going to scratch it, but Mikael tested it with cats.” He did indeed. Ikea even sent us a video of Axelsson's family moggy enjoying its owner's creation. Evidently, the chair passed. Ejdemo also tells me that, along with the usual rigorous Ikea testing, Axelsson's four daughters were drafted in to jump up and down on the seat.

Ejdemo is clearly proud of this chair and how it rights a historical design failure for the company. “I'm super happy we made it," he says. “To get all this to come together to make one good product takes a lot of work. You need to be determined. Passion has made this possible.”

He says he has 100 freelance designers on contract working with Ikea, but the actual in-house team consists of only 15 designers who work on the majority of the 1,500 to 2,000 products the company produces per year. “Mikael is one of these 15 with around 20 years of experience designing products for Ikea, which is something,” Ejdemo says. "It is tough to design products for Ikea.”

Experiencing how good the inflatable Easy Chair is leads me to ask if Ikea will take this success further. Now that the company has nailed cat-proof blow-up furniture, a whole new world of air-filled products is possible. Mattresses? Camping gear?

For now, the obvious extension is a sofa. I ask Ejdemo if Ikea is making one. He smiles broadly and pauses. “Now we know a lot more about working with air," he says. "I don't think we've scratched the surface on this. There's so much more to do.”