Ingvar Kamprad

• Born: March 30, 1926
• Birthplace: Agunnaryd, Sweden
• Died: January 27, 2018
• Place of death: Smaland, Sweden

Founder, IKEA

The Swedish company IKEA, which sells home furnishings, is a global phenomenon, with megastores spread throughout the world. IKEA is the brainchild of Ingvar Kamprad, who founded the company in 1943, when he was just seventeen, by selling pens and other small items out of his home. Kamprad developed his company with the idea of providing affordable quality furnishings to the masses. He accomplished that mission with notable success and, in the process, influenced other retailers with his innovative approach to retailing.

Education and Early Career

Ingvar Kamprad was born in 1926 in the town of Pjatteryd in Almhult, a district in Sweden. He was raised on his family's farm, Elmtaryd, in the small village of Agunnaryd, in the portion of southeastern Sweden known as Smaland. “I went to what I guess you would call a trade school,” he told Claudia Dreifus for the New York Times Magazine (6 Apr. 1997). “And it was there that I started to be interested in the way factories turn out products for the consumer.” In 1943, with his father's help, Kamprad established his own company, through which he sold matches, ballpoint pens, and other sundries. To name it, he combined his first and last initials with the first letters of “Elmtaryd” and “Agunnaryd,” and thus came up with the acronym IKEA.

Later Career

Some years later, Kamprad traveled outside Sweden for the first time: he went to Paris, at the invitation of IKEA's ballpoint-pen supplier. The trip inspired him to expand his business through advertisements in local newspapers and a primitive mail-order catalog. In 1950, Kamprad began selling locally manufactured home furnishings through his nascent mail-order business. Before long, encouraged by positive customer response, he became a furniture vendor on a much larger scale. In 1951, the first official IKEA catalog was published, and Kamprad soon discontinued all products except low-priced furniture.

Kamprad opened the first IKEA furniture showroom in Almhult in 1953. In 1961, at the suggestion of his designers, he adopted the concept of customer-assembled furniture. Such furniture would be shipped unassembled in flat packages, rather than in finished form in large, cumbersome crates. By reducing his shipping and storage costs, Kamprad could keep retail prices lower than could his competitors. Over the next three decades, IKEA continued to expand. Showrooms opened in Australia, Canada, Singapore, France, Iceland, and the Netherlands, among other places. The first IKEA store in the United States opened outside Philadelphia in 1985. By 2016, IKEA was operating 340 stores in twenty-eight countries.

Kamprad's success has been attributed to many factors. First, there was his zeal as a provider of affordable furniture. “Too many new and beautifully designed products can be afforded by only a small group of better-off people,” Kamprad wrote in a company philosophy guide that was issued to all senior IKEA executives, according to Peter Fuhrman for Forbes (21 Mar. 1988). “We have decided to side with the many.”

Kamprad was also known for being extremely cost-conscious. To get to airports, he took public transportation, and neither he nor IKEA executives flew first-class. According to Tanza Loudenback for Business Insider (16 Aug. 2015), despite having an estimated net worth of $48.1 billion in 2015, Kamprad “reportedly prefer[red] to fly economy, stay in cheap hotels, and ha[d] driven the same Volvo for two decades.”

Innovation was another key to Kamprad's success. One of his innovations was to drastically reduce the number of salespeople on the floor of a typical IKEA store. Without any salesperson hovering nearby, a shopper may simply wander about, trying out, say, various chairs or couches. After making a selection, within a short time that same day, the merchandise—unassembled, in flat boxes—is ready to be picked up from the shipping department. There are unquestionably inconveniences associated with the dearth of salespeople and the job of assembling the furniture oneself, but low prices make them palatable. Kamprad's stores also feature facilities designed to make shopping easier and more pleasant. There are lockers for public use, bathrooms, an in-store restaurant, and even a play area dubbed the “ballroom,” where parents can leave their children while shopping. The store in Almhult even boasts a hotel, complete with swimming pool and sauna. “We want to make it easy for young families to get their homes started,” Kamprad told Dreifus. “Or, put another way, we do nothing to stop people from buying from us.”

Another of Kamprad's distinguishing characteristics was his foresight. Apparently anticipating the ever-increasing population flight to the suburbs, he placed his stores in vast suburban lots, away from urban shopping districts but near major thoroughfares. The typical IKEA store lies on the outskirts of a major city and is easily accessible from a major expressway. Its trademark facade—with stripes of blue and yellow, the colors of the Swedish flag—beckons all who drive past.

“Too many new and beautifully designed products can be afforded by only a small group of better-off people. We have decided to side with the many.”

In keeping with his reputation for prescience, Kamprad made preparations to ensure that his brainchild will continue to thrive even after he is gone. In 1982, to limit estate taxes that would be levied at the time of his death, he transferred ownership of IKEA to a private foundation based in the Netherlands. And in 1986, he stepped down as president of IKEA and appointed as his successor Anders Moberg, who had joined the company in 1970 at age nineteen. To ensure that his vision carried into the future, Kamprad prepared a written record of his corporate philosophy. Not surprisingly, Kamprad's “foremost” directive was that “no effort shall be spared to keep the price picture down,” according to Fuhrman. Even after Kamprad stepped down as president of IKEA, he continued to play an active role in the running of the company.

Kamprad's image was tarnished in November 1994, when the Stockholm daily newspaper Expressen reported their discovery of Kamprad's name in the archives of Per Engdahl, a Swedish ultra-rightist and pro-Nazi activist who had died. The archives revealed that Kamprad had contacts with Engdahl's pro-Nazi group, the New Swedish Movement, between 1942 and 1950 and had befriended Engdahl himself. Kamprad responded to the revelations by sending a handwritten letter to IKEA employees worldwide in which he described his involvement with the group as “the greatest mistake of my life” and “a part of my life which I bitterly regret.” He explained that he had, in part, been influenced by his grandmother, a German who had fled the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia before World War II, and been drawn to Engdahl's vision of a “non-Communist, Socialist Europe.” The revelations about his activities during the 1940s reportedly dampened IKEA's business little, if at all. The controversy surfaced again in 2011, when a book published by Swedish journalist Elisabeth Åsbrink argued that Kamprad's ties to Engdahl and his involvement in the movement were more substantial than previously admitted.

Kamprad married his first wife, Kerstin Wadling, in 1950; the couple adopted a daughter, Annika Kihlblom. They later divorced, and Kamprad married Margaretha Stennert, with whom he had three sons: Peter, Mathias, and Jonas. Stennert died in 2011. In 2013, the Telegraph (26 June 2013) reported that Kamprad, who “left Sweden in the 1970s in protest at the country's high taxes, setting up residence in Switzerland,” was returning to his homeland. “Moving back to Sweden gets me closer to my family and my old friends,” Kamprad said. “After my dear wife Margaret[h]a died about a year and half ago, there is less that keeps me in Switzerland.”

Kamprad spent the rest of his life in Småland, Sweden, where he died at his home on January 27, 2018, of pneumonia. He was ninety-one years old.

Bibliography

Fuhrman, Peter. "The Workers' Friend." Forbes, 21 Mar. 1988, pp. 124+. MasterFILE Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f6h&AN=17831268&site=ehost-live. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.

"Ikea Founder Ingvar Kamprad Moves Back to Sweden after 40 Years in Switzerland." The Telegraph, 26 June 2013, www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/10145042/Ikea-founder-Ingvar-Kamprad-moves-back-to-Sweden-after-40-years-in-Switzerland.html. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.

"Ikea Founder Ingvar Kamprad's Nazi Ties 'Went Deeper.'" BBC News, BBC, 25 Aug. 2011, www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-14661582. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.

"Ikea Founder Tells of Past." The New York Times, 9 Nov. 1994, www.nytimes.com/1994/11/09/business/ikea-founder-tells-of-past.html. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.

Kamprad, Ingvar, et al. "Talking Shop." Interview by Claudia Dreifus. The New York Times Magazine, 6 Apr. 1997, www.nytimes.com/1997/04/06/magazine/talking-shop.html. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.

Lapowsky, Issie. "After 70 Years, Ikea Founder Steps Down." Inc., 5 June 2013, www.inc.com/issie-lapowsky/after-70-years-ikea-founder-steps-down.html. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.

Loudenback, Tanza. "How IKEA Founder Ingvar Kamprad Became One of the Richest Self-Made Billionaires." Business Insider, 16 Aug. 2015, www.businessinsider.com/how-ikea-founder-ingvar-kamprad-became-a-billionaire-2015-7. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.

McFadden, Robert. "Ingvar Kamprad, Founder of Ikea and Creator of a Global Empire, Dies at 91." The New York Times, 28 Jan. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/01/28/obituaries/ingvar-kamprad-dies.html. Accessed 9 Mar. 2018.