IKEA launches OSYNLIG collection in collaboration with Ben Gorham, Byredo founder

Collaborating with one of the best in the world of scents, Ben Gorham at Byredo,IKEA explores Invisible Design – the idea that it’s not just what your home looks like that affects how it makes you feel.  The result is OSYNLIG, a collection of 13 scented candles which provoke memories and heighten the experience of being at home.

Scents trigger strong memories, and have a powerful effect on people’s mood and emotions. The smell of cinnamon can make you feel the excitement of Christmas. The scent of pine trees and camp fires evokes the memory of a summer you will never forget. A whiff of just-washed laundry might bring you back to your parents’ home. According to the IKEA Life at Home report, people make a strong connection between how they perceive smell, and their feeling of home.

This knowledge inspired IKEA’s collaboration with Ben Gorham, founder of luxury fragrance and fashion house Byredo. The company offers a range of exclusive scents for people and homes. Their scented candles and perfumes have been developed with an understated approach, using simple composition of the highest quality raw materials. Together with Ben Gorham, IKEA has explored how to make use of the power of scents to create invisible design and to improve life at home.

OSYNLIG, Swedish for ‘invisible’, is a collection of 13 scented candles that are made to provoke a wide range of emotion – from nostalgia for the things you’ve done, to dreams of the things you might do – and, above all, heighten the experience of being at home.

To really make the collection inclusive for the many people, the collection has a concept of 13 scents divided into three bases – floral, woody and fresh. With such a wide selection, there is a scent for everyone all over the world. One can fall in love with one of the scents from the collection or let them blend together. The collection will be launched in November 2020, for Asia Pacific markets it will be launched in February 2021.

With this collection, IKEA wants to democratize scent and make it an affordable luxury at a low price. OSYNLIG brings high-end scent-making within the reach of the many people, and the concept of invisible design to a wider audience than ever.

When the possibilities to adjust the three dimensional aspects of our homes are limited, the invisible design – the use of smell, sound and light – can offer new and unexpected solutions to the challenges we face in our lives at home today.

“Smell is a very relevant part of the home, and it creates a sense of comfort and security. “We’re trying to develop a ton of smells enforcing the idea that everyone has a different relationship to it, and nothing is right or wrong”, Ben Gorham says.

“Invisible design is that layer on top of functionality that completes the home, the intangible things like lighting, mood and atmosphere that enable you to have a really emotive, interesting environment,” says James Futcher, Creative Leader at IKEA for OSYNLIG. “It’s this idea that made me think differently about my own home and the opportunity we had in developing OSYNLIG – it was never about making scented candles as much as it was about encouraging the many people to tap into memories, other abstract things, as they construct their own homes”.