Erika Pekkari

Erika Pekkari (b. 1957, Haparanda) is a Swedish designer who reached IKEA in 1989 through an unsolicited letter. She grew up in a small town on the Swedish-Finnish border, later moving to Stockholm where she trained at the Lenning Textile Institute in Norrköping and then at Beckmans College of Design. After several years working as a fashion designer she gradually shifted toward product design and interior architecture.

Her first major project for IKEA was the HAPARANDA sofa in 1993, a compact, clean-lined piece named after her home town. In 1995 she participated in the inaugural IKEA PS collection, which established the Democratic Design concept. The 1998 IKEA catalogue featured the GÖTA candlesticks: aluminium and cast iron cones in contrasting finishes, designed together with Karin Tellander, among the most recognisable decorative objects IKEA produced in that decade. In 1999 her name acquired an unlikely pop-culture dimension: the narrator of Fight Club speaks it aloud while paging through an IKEA catalogue in one of cinema’s best-known product-placement scenes.

After her IKEA years Pekkari completed postgraduate studies at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and moved into public and office interior architecture. Her later clients include Svenskt Tenn and the Nobel Foundation.

In the IKEA Museum catalogue corpus, her credited work includes DAGIS, GLIS, TROFAST, KRITTER, BISSERUP, and the DRÖMMINGE range (2003–2019), from which the lamp held in this archive comes.