The AMIRAL armchair was first launched in 1970, when it had a frame in fully welded, chrome-plated steel tubing. The seat, back and armrests were solid, high-end saddle leather from Johnssons Sadelmakeri in Killeberg. IKEA bought the parts from the saddlery and sent them to Mitab, an engineering company in Tranås, which made the frame and assembled the overall chair.
The chair quickly became popular. But it wasn’t easy to keep up with customer demand for AMIRAL. The saddlery had limited capacity and was unable to make the leather details quickly enough. Also, the armchair couldn’t be packed into a flat pack. AMIRAL took a lot of space during shipping and storage, which made it quite expensive. A new version that could be flat-packed and self-assembled was therefore presented in the 1973 IKEA catalogue. This one had a sand-coloured load-bearing fabric in the seat and back instead of leather, and a thin seating cushion in sand-coloured fabric. Only the armrests were leather, which brought the price down by 15%. Even so, AMIRAL designer Karin Mobring always preferred the original.
