STOCKHOLM—Representatives for Swedish furniture giant IKEA on Monday said the company regrets removing women from some of the photos in catalogs shipped to Saudi Arabia. The move sparked criticism from government officials in Sweden and raised questions about whether some IKEA franchises can violate values that most company stores abide by.

 

IKEA's catalog is shipped all over the world, with the company this year expected to publish 200 million copies with 62 different versions. The bulk of the catalog is exactly the same in most markets, but the company has said in the past it tailors the images to suit fashion-related tastes of local markets.

 

In some cases, however, the catalog is changed to align with cultural standards.

 

A comparison of the Saudi catalog to a standard version of the catalog showed that several women photographed in the standard version are missing from pages of the Saudi version. Otherwise, the photos throughout the catalog appear to be virtually identical.

 

The discrepancy was first reported by Metro, a free newspaper in Stockholm. A spokeswoman for the IKEA Group—which handles the catalog for the furniture company—said the move is in conflict with company values and IKEA is reviewing its procedures as a result.

Saudi Arabia is often criticized for treatment of women that includes forbidding travel, study or work without permission from their male guardians. Saudi Arabia also prohibits women from driving a car.

 

"As a producer of the catalog, we regret the current situation," Ylva Magnusson, spokeswoman for IKEA Group, which runs 298 of 337 IKEA stores world-wide, said. "We should have reacted and realized that excluding women from the Saudi Arabian version of the catalog is in conflict with the IKEA Group values."

 

A spokeswoman for Inter IKEA Systems B.V., another arm of IKEA that actually oversees all franchisees including the company's three Saudi Arabia stores, didn't return calls seeking comment. IKEA Group operates most IKEA franchises but not the ones in Saudi Arabia. It makes the catalog for all IKEA markets.

 

Ms. Magnusson said the company is reviewing its routines to ensure that the different versions of the IKEA catalogs correspond to its antidiscrimination and human-rights policies.

"We encourage fair treatment and equal employment opportunities without regard to race, ethnicity, religion, gender, disability, age or sexual orientation," she said.

 

The retailer has long aimed to avoid the political spotlight, but has had difficulty steering clear of scrutiny given the size of its operation and the amount of countries it does business in.

"You cannot remove or retouch women out of reality," Swedish trade minister Ewa Bjorling said in an email. "If women aren't allowed to be seen or work then Saudi Arabia is losing half of its intellectual capital." Ms. Bjorling said the images are another sad example that show there is a long way to go in terms of equality between women and men in Saudi Arabia.

IKEA's catalogs are one of the company's primary marketing materials. In recent years, IKEA has changed the way it creates many of the pages in its catalog, abandoning traditional photo shoots in some cases in favor of purely digital design. This enables easier manipulation of photos so designers can, for instance, switch colors in a room to meet the tastes of a local market, or remove a vase of flowers from a table.

 

In the standard version of the new catalog, one photo features a woman wearing pajamas and standing in the bathroom with a young boy next to her and a man kneeling behind while wrapping another young boy in a towel. But in the Saudi catalog, the woman has disappeared from the picture, leaving only what looks like a father and his sons in the bathroom.

 

In another picture, a woman standing in the middle of a room surrounded by IKEA's new colorful design collection has been erased from the Saudi version of the catalog, leaving only men in the room. Some pictures featuring women have also been removed completely from the catalog or replaced with other pictures, though not all women and girls have been wiped out.

 

This is the second time in less than two weeks that IKEA's marketing photos have stirred political controversy.

 

The company, looking to avoid a potential political fallout, on Sept. 21 deleted a photo from its Russian corporate Web page showing four young people in balaclavas that could have been viewed as a gesture of support for three jailed members of Russian punk group Pussy Riot. The deleted photo was part of a Russian marketing campaign that included a photo competition in Russian MEGA shopping malls, which receive about 200 million visitors per year.