Bought some “samla” storage boxes, only to find the lids are a seperate purchase, so I got the lids, now i discover the lids dont clip onto the bases in anyway and that they distort and dont sit properly on the box bases, IKEA has to understand there are minimum standards that they have to meet and selling each component seperately and at an extra cost invalidates them appearing cheap and making them out of materials that easily and by themselves distort invalidates moulding plastic in the first place. fourthly mine seem 1cm too tall for sliding under a standard bed height ?
so lets list the design flaws so far :
• 1 plastic distorts by itself after purchase perhaps plastic not cured properly ?
• 2 1cm to tall for fitting under a bed
• 3 doesn’t include as standard way to self clip onto box base without extra faffy purchasable parts
• 4 when stacked they slide around on top of each other rather than stacking neatly foot of box into socket on lid. (only possible reason for this is perhaps breaking roll resistance when transported in a car but if the lid flys off whats the difference ? )
All of these issues could have been solved by merely doing better product design in the first place, ie negligible extra cost just a tiny bit of extra design thought, into the moulds to make the product. If IKEA is supposed to be thoughtful on product design, the boxes label extolls “Design and Quality IKEA of Sweden” i would expect some their most mass produced ubiquitously sold items to demonstrate that extra thought. And to be honest its the little touches of design thought, that lead to a product having a longer use life because when people respect a product they care for it better and it lasts longer.
In fact a moulded plastic box in all its multiplicitous forms is a key signifier of the benefits of real design. if IKEA cant design a moulded box properly is doesn’t bode well for their design in general.
re the name “Samla”, their trans centro european product naming sytem is so anonymous and so indifferent and culturally in-sensitive to the countrys theyre retailing in, and often has so little to do with the function of the object it makes you want to vomit. in swedish it means “gather” which is kind of okay for the swedish, but even that is horribly vague, pity they arent a german company or it might be something usefull like “underbedbox” something descriptive rather than wishy washy. guess it all comes down to labelling the boxes in different languages would increase the expense of them, then on the other hand why label the box, why not just label the carton the boxes are shipped in with a barcode and have the stores/websites name it appropriately for each country.
These boxes are beginning to have that feeling of just more crap that ive brought into my life unecessarily and maybe ill throw away at some point later, because I can’t warm to the design flaws i’ve uncovered. Which seems to be a trend with the stuff im buying nowadays.
It’s all somehow deceptively sub-standard, as though the whole of corporatised retail is generally just a way to palm off bad design through clever marketing, is it because marketing is cheaper than design, and marketing has to be done anyway ? so its easier to drop design when cost cutting than marketing ?
These boxes were made in italy not china so there really isnt the excuse of what do you expect of cheap stuff made in china which is what allot of people seem to trot out, as an excuse to waste the worlds resources generating product that seems disposable by design.