The world's laziest cat gets a job: waking Sweden's forgotten phones

Stockholm, Sweden · 16 September 2026 · For immediate release

Barnluren is giving away a genuine vintage Garfield phone, the world's laziest cat as a working telephone. The point is not nostalgia. It is to get Swedes to open their storage rooms.

Sweden has hundreds of thousands of working landline phones in wardrobes, basements and drawers. They rarely become e-waste and are almost never reused. They just sit there. Barnluren takes them in, checks and cleans them, and lets them ring again in the home of a child who does not have a mobile phone. Now there is a reason to actually go and fetch that phone: a prize draw for what may be the cutest phone in the world.

Entry is free and open until 13 October at barnluren.com/kretsloppet/tavling. The prize is a genuine vintage Garfield phone in working order, plus a Barnluren subscription for life, so the cat can ring for a child instead of sitting on a shelf.

How the loop works

Anyone with an old landline phone fills in a short form at barnluren.com/kretsloppet and gets a PostNord QR code straight away. The service point prints the label, and shipping is free. Two questions come before anything is sent: is it a mobile phone, and does it work. A wrong answer stops the form before shipping is booked, so nobody sends anything in vain.

At Barnluren the handset, ring and keypad are checked and the phone is cleaned. Then it meets a family, with its photo and its story, and becomes the child's own phone. The sender can write a few lines about the phone and a greeting to the child who receives it, and decides whether the greeting may be shown.

When the child outgrows the phone, the idea is that it rings on in the next family. A phone never leaves the loop.

About the draw

• Period: 15 September to 13 October 2026
• Prize: a genuine vintage Garfield phone, used and in working order, worth about SEK 1,500, plus a free Barnluren subscription for one household for as long as the service operates
• Entry: free, no purchase necessary, one entry per person, 18 or older and resident in Sweden
• Extra chances: sharing your personal link gives one extra chance per friend who enters, up to five. Sharing is voluntary and never a condition for winning
• Draw: at random within seven days after the draw closes
• Terms: barnluren.com/kretsloppet/tavling/villkor

What Barnluren is

Barnluren is a landline phone for the home, connected over Wi-Fi to a closed family network. The child can only call contacts the parents have approved. No screen, no open internet, no connection to the ordinary phone network. The handset can be an analogue phone the family already owns. Family and friends answer in a free app.

Calls are never recorded, and the only information stored about the child is a first name. The service runs on Barnluren's own infrastructure in the EU, with no advertising and no sale of data. Barnluren is a closed network and cannot call external numbers, including the emergency number 112.