Winter and touchscreens don’t mix because gloves and mittens aren’t so capacitive. IKEA’s Beröra sewing kit could change the world forever, had they not decided to only produce 12,000 of the thread kits. We demand IKEA bring it back.
Beröra is an über-simple solution to the woolly-handed problems of winter. It’s a sewing kit with a piece of conductive thread which turns the glove of your choice into a touchscreen-ready glove. We’ve seen touchscreen gloves before, but the idea that any glove could be a touchscreen glove is the kind of bigger hammer thinking we’ve come to expect from IKEA. Well done.
Unfortunately, this brilliant idea wasn never intended for a long lifespan on the shelves of IKEA — It was a short-lived marketing campaign designed to promote IKEA’s new iPad catalogue in Norway. The catalogue came out in mid-winter, and the Beröra kits sold out in under two weeks.
This is an injustice. We demand that like Sweedish meatballs before it, the Beröra be brought to other parts of the world so that next winter we might all touchscreen-enable our gloves. There is a bright future ahead in which winter will no longer dominate my tablet usage. It’s up to IKEA to make this right. Do the right thing, IKEA. [PSFK via Laughing Squid]