Historical Figure
Ingvar Kamprad
1926–2018
Swedish businessman (1926–2018)
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Biography
Feodor Ingvar Kamprad was a Swedish billionaire businessman who founded IKEA in 1943 and grew it into a multinational retail company that became the world's largest furniture seller in 2008. He moved to Switzerland with his Swiss wife in 1976, moving back to Småland in 2014 after her death in 2011.
In Their Own Words (5)
We still have a long way to go—or as I have written so many times, and said at the end of hundreds of speeches: We are just at the beginning. A glorious future!
1998, quoted in The IKEA Story by Bertil Torekull. , 1998
Nobody can guarantee a company or a concept of eternal life, but no one can accuse me of not having tried to.
Quoted by Richard Milne in "Ikea’s fiendishly complex construction," Financial Times, November 13, 2012. , 2012
Most things still remain to be done!
Quoted by Martin Enthed in "", June 24, 2014. , 2014
Only while sleeping one makes no mistakes. Making mistakes is the privilege of the active—of those who can correct their mistakes and put them right.
"The Testament of a Furniture Dealer" (1976). , 1976
You can do so much in ten minutes’ time. Ten minutes, once gone, are gone for good. Divide your life into 10-minute units and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity.
Quoted in the October 2017 issue of Men’s Health magazine, page 41. , 2017
Timeline
The story of Ingvar Kamprad, told in moments.
Born on a farm in Agunnaryd, Sweden. Dyslexic. Started selling matches to neighbors at age five. By seven he'd expanded to fish, pencils, and Christmas decorations, delivering them by bicycle.
Founds IKEA at 17 using money his father gave him as a reward for good grades. The name combines his initials (I.K.) with the first letters of the farm (Elmtaryd) and village (Agunnaryd) where he grew up.
Introduces flat-pack furniture after a designer named Gillis Lundgren removes the legs from a table to fit it in his car. That accident becomes the entire business model. Ship it flat. Let the customer build it.
His wartime ties to Swedish fascism are exposed. He'd joined Per Engdahl's pro-Nazi movement as a teenager. He writes a letter calling it the 'greatest mistake of my life.' He was 17 at the time.
Dies in Smaland, Sweden, at 91. Worth an estimated $58 billion, he drove an old Volvo, flew economy class, and ate at IKEA cafeterias. His three sons inherit a furniture empire with 422 stores in 50 countries.
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