The Hippest, Most Exclusive Toddler Table in Town
What's behind the enthusiasm for and ongoing scarcity of the IKEA FLISAT children's play table?
The other day, I got a text from a mom friend of mine asking after a play table. Not just any play table– the IKEA FLISAT children’s table.
She was interested in getting one for her son, who is around my daughter’s age. But, it was completely out of stock in every Southern California IKEA store and unavailable for shipping. She’d looked into getting it on the secondary market, where sellers were asking for prices she wasn’t comfortable paying. “Apparently, it’s THE table,” she said.
A few days later, she got back in touch to let me know that she’d gotten an alert that they were back in stock in one of our local stores and had ordered one. I was sitting at my computer and had the FLISAT table’s product page open in one of my tabs, from when I’d googled it the first time she’d asked me about it. By the time I’d refreshed the page, the FLISAT was once again unavailable for delivery to my zip code– the same as her zip code. Every FLISAT had been snatched up within minutes. It was the IKEA equivalent of a Black Friday run on Rae Dunn products at a red state Home Goods. Confounding.
Two days before, I had no idea what the FLISAT table was. Now, I felt myself being drawn into its mystery. What is the FLISAT? Why is the FLISAT? Is it pronounced “FLEE-sat” or “FLEYE-sat” or “FLIH-saht” or “flih-SAHT” or what? Do I need a FLISAT? Why do I feel like I might need one now that I know that other people want them so badly? Why is the secondary market so crazy? Is the FLISAT basically crypto for moms?
Once I knew it existed, the FLISAT was everywhere, and nowhere.
I still haven’t seen one in person (although my friend said that I was welcome to come over and inspect hers once it arrived, which I might do to get some extra steps in), but from what I can see from photos online, it’s basically a pine wood table with white surface panels that can be removed to reveal plastic bins (named, IKEA-ly, TROFAST). The bins can be used for storage of supplies, or for sensory activities. “Sensory activities,” from what I have gleaned, is a fancier way to describe child messmaking. Little matching wooden stools can be purchased separately. To me, the FLISAT just looked like a cute little table. What was I missing?
It wasn’t the price. The FLISAT retails for $89.99 at my local IKEA– when it’s actually in stock– which puts it at the lower end of the price range for toddler activity tables, but not so low that it’s breaking the tiny table market.
Maybe it’s that Montessori parents like it— the FLISAT is a frequent flier on Montessori Facebook groups and blog posts. (I know it started as an educational philosophy that was supposed to be accessible to all children, but the biggest parent hypebeasts I know are Montessori devotees.)
For a long time, the FLISAT was as easy to grab from one’s local IKEA as a Swedish meatball. But then, 2020 and all of its attendant pandemic headaches hit, jamming up the supply chain just as parents and children were stuck home together all day long, driving each other nuts. There are dozens of posts on parenting message boards starting around the early days of what we now refer to as “lockdown,” lamenting the fact that all of the IKEA stores in their area were out of FLISAT, and updating each other about when the piece was back in stock in their cities.
But the problems continued beyond the sourdough days. Back in 2021– long after we stopped doing those weird “pandemic happy hours”-- IKEA was dinged by an investigation by an environmental advocacy group called Earthsight, which found that despite its promise of responsible wood sourcing, the furniture giant was selling furniture made from illegally logged trees from protected Siberian forests (mincing no words, the report was called “IKEA’S HOUSE OF HORRORS”). From the NBC News report on the findings,
A review of the supply chain for some of Ikea's most popular children's furniture — including Sundvik beds and Flisat dollhouses — showed that some of the pine wood is likely to have come from Russian logging companies in Siberia that repeatedly violated Russian environmental laws designed to protect the vast boreal forests, said the report, from the London-based group Earthsight.
The wood cut from protected Russian forests is likely to have ended up in other Ikea products, as well as in the products of other Western companies, Earthsight said.
Ikea has now told Earthsight and NBC News that it has cut ties with the logging companies in the report.
The FLISAT table is not among the items singled out in the Earthsight report, but the FLISAT is made of solid pine wood. If IKEA were forced to cut ties with logging companies that provided pine for other products, that would mean less pine to go around. It’s also possible that the supply chain issue comes from an entirely different set of complications involving an entirely different supplier.
Whether it was a supply chain issue, a Montessori hypebeast issue, or some convergence of the two, the end of pandemic restrictions did not spell the end of FLISAT bottlenecks. We are currently on year four of FLISAT demand far outstripping supply, with no end in sight and no communication from the IKEA Pøwërs Thåt Bë about what’s going on.
Some thwarted would-be FLISAT owners are venting their frustration on parenting forums, like these two Reddit users from three years ago and one year ago, respectively:
Praying for them.
Commenters on both posts weighed in on how long it had been out of stock in their cities. Some comments were spaced years apart, checking back in to see if anything had changed. Some said they’d been waiting since 2020 for what is apparently the only children’s table in the entire world.
Others stymied by FLISAT’s perpetual sold out status have taken it upon themselves to make their own dupes. You can find several instructional videos on how to do that on YouTube. Here’s one:
As you may notice, with legs that look nothing like the kind that go with the actual FLISAT table, this dupe is probably geared toward parents who are more interested in function than form. But this was 2021. Desperate times. We’d reached the phase of the pandemic when we were big mad at all the rich people trying to jump the line for COVID vaccines. Nobody was thinking clearly.
Here’s another one that looks at little bit more like the actual table, found on Facebook:
Meanwhile, rumors swirled that IKEA had actually discontinued the FLISAT, which helped stoke a secondary market that can veer into bonkers territory. This was, at the time, a table that was selling for somewhere between $65 and $89 in stores. In the secondary market, people were asking for upwards of $150 for the table. On Facebook Marketplace, some sellers were asking for (and getting) over $100 for FLISAT tables so beaten up that they look like they’d gotten in a bar fight with another FLISAT table.
This eBay seller, claiming the FLISAT is discontinued, is asking for $499.000 for a gently used child’s play table. “... this one is retired and discontinued forever by IKEA,” reads the ad. Later, the seller adds, “Ikea will be out of stock until 2023.”
Get them while they last, folks. They’ve already sold one of the two available.
A secondary market this hot practically invites bots and scammers to take advantage by scooping up FLISAT tables the second they become available and reselling them like they’re tickets to Taylor Swift’s Era’s tour, which might contribute to some parents’ frustration when all they want is a goddamn wooden table for their kid to play on. There are some suspiciously FLISAT-y tables available on Amazon for $99. You can find plenty on eBay. They’re out there; they’re just twice as expensive as they should be for a used item and four times as expensive as they should be new.
Maybe the FLISAT is a victim (or beneficiary, depending on whether you own stock in IKEA) of Must-Have-Toy-Of-The Season Syndrome, like a Cabbage Patch Kid or a Tickle Me Elmo or a Beanie Baby. It became popular because a lot of people were attracted to the features of the table itself, and then, it became even more popular, because it was popular. People think the FLISAT is the must-have table for the same fallacious reasons that people tend to think that a restaurant that always has a line out the door must have good food.
There is a thriving FLISAT community online and there are plenty of places to see photos and videos of well-behaved children performing gentle sensory play (poking at sand or floating citrus slices to a treacly piano rendition of the theme from “UP”) in their tables, satisfied customers all.
But others bought into the hype only to realize that they were going through all this strife for a table. Wrote one disappointed FLISAT owner on a parenting forum: “I checked Ikea for a YEAR before I found one in stock. I was SO excited. Now I have it....it's just a table. I am in the Flisat FB groups and see the moms who do the cool activities but I don't even do them. So it's really just a table. I would not pay double. :( All the cool activities seem to involve water or rice or similarly extremely messy items, which I am not willing to use. My twins played with colored pasta in the bins for a while....but it's kind of overrated tbh. Unless you are REALLY gonna do the activities.”
I spent hours reading reviews of this and other tables, growing more curious about what Scandinavian witchcraft this table possessed that gave it its own group of fans. I even signed up for text alerts for when the table will be restocked in the IKEA closest to me, in Burbank, California. And as I was writing this– I shit you not– I received a text notification that the table was now available for delivery to my address. Would I like to order it?
There are slightly cheaper play tables. There are much more stylish-looking play tables. There are play tables with more available storage, that take up less space, that look sturdier, that are adjustable for when the toddler becomes a grade schooler.
But I ordered it. We need a play table, anyway, and if I don’t like it, I can always offload it to another mom, for the same or less than I paid for it.
Five minutes after I received a notification that my order had been processed, I refreshed the FLISAT table page on the IKEA website. It had already sold out.