IKEA made everyday FRAKTA hacks look like high-fashion portraits

IKEA Italy has celebrated the 30th anniversary of its iconic blue FRAKTA bag by focusing on what happens after customers take it home.

Called Belli organizzati, or Beautifully Organized, the campaign presents ten unexpected ways Italians use the inexpensive and durable bag. Each real-life habit has been recreated as a colourful editorial photograph that gives an everyday household object the treatment normally reserved for fashion accessories.

IKEA discovered that FRAKTA rarely remains a shopping bag

FRAKTA was created to carry purchases home from an IKEA store, but customers have spent decades finding new purposes for it.

Research and interviews conducted for the campaign revealed that Italians use the bag as a cat bed, children’s paddling pool, suitcase, laundry basket, moving box and storage container for vinyl records.

Other photographs show FRAKTA carrying groceries at an outdoor market, holding basketball uniforms in a changing room and transporting a synthesizer inside a music studio.

The bag remains unchanged in every image. Its purpose changes according to the person using it.

Everyday storage became the subject of a fashion shoot

Italian street photographer Salvatore Matarazzo photographed the unusual uses with strong lighting, saturated colours and expressive characters.

An elegantly dressed woman stands at a market beside a FRAKTA filled with groceries. A stylish traveller carries the blue bag along a railway platform. Elsewhere, a basketball player holds up a uniform beside a bag packed with team clothing.

The exaggerated styling makes each scene feel like a fashion editorial. FRAKTA is presented confidently in the centre of the compositions, showing that its low price and practical construction are part of its identity rather than qualities that need to be hidden.

The customers supplied the campaign’s creative ideas

The ten photographs were inspired by uses shared during interviews instead of situations invented only for advertising.

This gives Belli organizzati an observational quality. IKEA is documenting the relationship customers have already developed with the product and celebrating their ability to adapt it to different parts of daily life.

A bag used for moving house can later become storage for records. A laundry carrier can hold sports uniforms. With a little imagination, it can even become a temporary pool or a comfortable sleeping place for a cat.

Belli organizzati connects storage with personal identity

The campaign introduces IKEA Italy’s broader platform, Fai spazio a ciò che ami, which means Make room for what you love.

Its message treats organization as more than keeping a home tidy. The way people store, carry and display their possessions can reveal what matters to them, from music and sport to travel, family life and pets.

The title Belli organizzati also plays with this idea. It suggests that people can be organized practically while still expressing their personality and individual style.

By turning customer habits into editorial portraits, IKEA shows how a simple product can become culturally valuable through repeated use. After 30 years, FRAKTA is still a blue shopping bag, but its owners have made it much more than that.

Credits

Belli organizzati, 2026. IKEA Italy. Creative agency Ogilvy Italy, Milan. Production company Noname Creative Group, Milan. Photographer Salvatore Matarazzo. The ten-image project was created for FRAKTA’s 30th anniversary and launched as the opening chapter of IKEA Italy’s Fai spazio a ciò che ami platform.