Ikea’s Signature Blue-and-Yellow Shopping Bag Is Getting a Makeover

Danish design collective Hay has redesigned Ikea’s signature Frakta shopping bag, snubbing the brash blue-and-yellow color scheme of the brand’s familiar logo for a more neutral palette. Part of an upcoming collaboration launching in 2017 between the furniture giant and the company co-founded by Rolf and Mette Hay, the new bag is a tonal makeunder of the original, designed by siblings Marianne and Knut Hagberg. An Ikea representative told me in an email that the new tote, which looks more like a woven fabric bag than its shiny predecessor, will also be made of 100 percent fully recyclable polypropylene.

In order to manufacture the prototype, Ikea said, roughly 2.5-mm-wide polypropylene fibers were dyed and then woven in an automatic weaving machine that ensured there would be zero waste when cutting the fabric to make the bag. The woven fabric was then cut and stitched together using a combination of automatic and conventional stitching machines. The handle straps were woven separately from pre-dyed material to ensure a 100 percent color match.

“From the start, Mette wanted to take a look at some of the really iconic pieces from IKEA,” Ikea Design Manager Marcus Engman said. “Asking, what are the most iconic things in IKEA that everybody recognizes? She wanted to do something with these things, give them a new life.”

Hay is one of the key players in a movement among contemporary Scandinavian designers to breathe new life into the traditions of the region’s illustrious midcentury past, often referred to as “new Scandinavian” or “new Nordic” design. The Hay-Ikea collaboration is part of “the journey to create a new Scandinavian design identity” for Ikea, the company said in a press release. “When we see the world is changing, how people live is changing, how people use products is changing, we have a duty to reinvent our basics,”  Engman said. “Still with a typical IKEA design sensibility, so you can see that it relates to our Scandinavian heritage.”

The collection will also include furniture, lighting, accessories, and textiles that capture Hay’s contemporary spin on the familiar codes of traditional Scandinavian design. Like the new bag, much of the furniture in the new collection will be gray, white, and green.

“The idea we had for the collection, which also came from Rolf and Mette, was to do design which is totally clever, but understated at the same time,” Engman said in the press release, calling it design that “blends in” and has “longevity,” which is part of Ikea’s recent effort to revisit its production methods, align itself with high-profile designers, and ultimately attempt to change the perception that it is only a place to buy cheap stuff.