KLIPPAN is not only an unusually durable sofa in a classic design. With its removable cover, it’s also very easy to change its appearance. Over the years, IKEA has offered hundreds of different covers for KLIPPAN, from the discreet to the highly imaginative. And as if that wasn’t enough, IKEA has also sold patterns so that handy customers could make their own cover from a fabric of their choice.
The story of KLIPPAN started at the home of Lars Engman, who was product developer for IKEA sofas and armchairs at the time. He had received two, as he put it, “Italian and terribly expensive sofas” to try out. As a product developer, Lars also had to look at competitors’ products to see how they worked, all in the interests of providing good design and function at a lower price. The expensive design sofas looked good, but in just a few months Lars’s six-year-old daughter and her friends had managed to ruin them by jumping on them. This got Lars wondering whether it was possible to make a good, child-proof sofa with a low price: “Surely it would be possible to create a reasonably priced sofa, one that’s child-friendly – which basically means bounce-friendly – without hard edges? And ideally with a removable cover.”
Japanese designer Noboru Nakamura was given the assignment to develop the sofa, based on a previous sofa he had designed for IKEA, LAPPMON. That sofa had a pine underframe, castors, and a patchwork leather cover nailed to the frame. It was quite a sophisticated design that had not sold very well. Lars asked if Noboru could use that frame as a starting point and create a simpler sofa. In the design process, everything that was unnecessary was removed, giving KLIPPAN its clean, natural look. At the same time, a big chunk of the cost was removed as well.
To make a removable cover, the size of the sofa had to be adapted to the width of fabric reels at the time, which were 150 cm. That way the cover could not only be taken off, but would also fit inside a household washing machine. IKEA had sold removable covers before, but only on larger sofas and the covers had to be dry cleaned. And that cost a lot of money. With KLIPPAN, for the first time the sofa cover could be washed or replaced often.
KLIPPAN was launched in 1979, but it took a while for customers to realise how magnificent it was. This could be because in the early days, only covers with quite advanced patterns were available. But as more and more different covers came along, its popularity rose. KLIPPAN evolved into a sofa that suited both homes and public environments.
