Ingvar Kamprad

It was the start of flat packing in mass production and would save everyone money. The manufacturers would pay less to post items and the consumer would spend less because prices would be altered to reflect that they had to do some of the work themselves. Ensuring the furniture was sourced cheaply was essential to the Ikea business model.

Armchairs, coffee tables and sofa beds were produced by local manufacturers in the forests near Elmtaryd, the family farm, and Kamprad saw the opportunity of becoming a furniture provider on a larger scale. He soon decided to focus entirely on low-priced furniture. Having discovered that Swedish timber merchants were being told not to sell to him, he began travelling to Poland to source materials with clandestine efforts employed to delivered the products. In spite of price wars, boycotts and cartels organised by competitors — along with an alcohol addiction he picked up from an over indulgence in Polish vodka — Kamprad weathered out the storm and the expansion of Ikea continued. The first Ikea store opened in Almhult, Sweden, 1953 and that year Kamprad was able to open the first Ikea showroom, enabling the customers to see the furnishings before ordering.

By the 1960s Ikea’s geographical expansion was well underway, with new stores opening throughout Sweden, most notably the giant warehouse outside Stockholm and further stores in Norway and Denmark. Ikea’s development in these years epitomised the golden years in western Europe, which were characterised by unprecedented consumption, rapid urbanization and large-scale house-building projects. Ikea, offering cheap-yet-good furniture, was the ideal choice for the young generation.

The company’s manifesto of offering “a wide range of home furnishing items of good design and function at prices so low that the majority of the people can afford to buy them” has stayed true, successfully attracting consumers to out-of-town locations all over. It also bridged classes. Viscount Linley, who sells high-end cabinetry, has said that he Ikea. “There is nothing wrong with it,” he said. “You just have to put it together properly.”

With Billy bookcases and Lack tables featured in student digs and middle-class houses alike, Kamprad had delved into a market that would eventually earn him a fortune. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Kamprad had an estimated net worth of $58.7 billion, making him the world’s eighth-richest person. Indeed, it was even said that 10 per cent of Europeans were conceived in an Ikea bed — having first erected it correctly.

In 1971, when Ikea’s flagship store at Kungens Kurva in Stockholm reopened after a fire, self-service was introduced. Partly on the ground of taxation, Kamprad and the Ikea headquarters moved to Copenhagen in 1973, although the development department stayed in Almhult. Throughout that decade new stores opened in Germany, Switzerland, Australia and Canada and in 1987 it opened its first store in Warrington, in Britain.

Ikea’s 1996 advert “chuck out the chintz” showed how influential the brand had become. With homemakers being told “don’t let that doily, just go and spoil everything” and to embrace the new trend for minimalism, a new appetite for “clean, contemporary design” was awoken. Naresh Ramchandani, who wrote the song for the advert, told Dezeen, the architecture and design magazine. Their plan was to “convert the UK’s sense of what homely is”.

“To get the Ikea style adopted, they had to put it right at the centre of British taste, and push out the old version of British taste,” Ramchandani said. With more than 20 Ikea stores in the UK today it would seem the advertising team were on to something. To date Ikea stores operate in 38 countries with a total of 314 Ikea stores.

Yet the company’s accession to the top of the home furnishings market was not without scandal. There were accusations of plagiarism, which did not culminate until 1986 when the company converted to a franchising model. In 1994 Swedish media revealed that in his youth Kamprad had enjoyed links with the Nazis and, between 1945 and 1948, long after the Nazi atrocities had been revealed following the Second World War, he had attended pro-Nazi meetings in Sweden. At his first wedding in 1950 Per Engdahl, the pro-Nazi leader of the Neo-Swedish movement, had been a guest. After the revelations Kamprad sent a letter to every employee entitled: “The greatest mistake of my life.”

Ingvar Feodor Kamprad was born in 1926 to Feodor Kamprad, a German immigrant, and Berta (née Nilsson). He grew up on a farm and as a child was apparently lazy, refusing to get out of bed to help his father milk the cows.

In 1897 his grandfather committed suicide when he could not pay the mortgage but his wife, Franziska, managed to save the family farm from bankruptcy by hard work and pure willpower. The young Ingvar was close to his grandmother, whose worldview was profoundly shaped by her conservative and Sudeten German legacy. She influenced her grandson with her enthusiasm for Hitler.

Even as a young boy Ingvar seemed to know that he wanted to develop a business. Aged only five he began by selling matches to neighbours having found that he could buy them in bulk and sell them at a lower price than competitors while still making a good profit. By the age of 11 he had expanded into selling Christmas tree decorations, seeds and fish, the profits from which he used to by a racing bike and typewriter. By 17, using a gift from his father aimed for succeeding in his studies, Kamprad registered a small company based on a mail-order concept. The firm, Ikea — the name formed from his own initials and the first letters of Elmtaryd and Agunnaryd, the little village where he grew up — originally sold pens, wallets and nylon stockings. By 1948 Ikea was selling furniture by mail order.

In 1950 he married Kerstin Wadling, a secretary and they adopted a daughter, Annika Kihlbom. The marriage was dissolved in 1961 and the contact with his daughter was damaged. “The whole matter pains me and still hurts,” he once said. “I considered myself a real shit.”

Business, however, did not suffer. The next year Ikea published its first catalogue and Kamprad had made his first million. In 1963 he married Margaretha Stennert, a teacher. They had three sons: Peter, Jonas and Mathias. Despite in an interview with Forbes magazine in which their father said that while he admired his three sons “I don’t think any of them is capable of running the company, at least not yet”, they have all gone onto hold senior jobs within the company.

In 1973 he took his family to Denmark, where they stayed for five years, before emigrating to a village near Lausanne in Switzerland, for tax purposes. From the mid-1980s Kamprad gradually transferred power to his sons and senior employees. His hold over Ikea’s complex business structure remained significant, however. Under the new leadership Ikea expanded further, including new markets in Eastern Europe, North America and East Asia.

In 2011, the year his wife died, Kamprad set up the Kamprad Family Foundation, with the mission “to support, stimulate and reward education and scientific research in a way that supports entrepreneurship, the environment, competence, health and social progress”. In 2014 he returned to Sweden. He always admitted that he was “a bit tight”, always flying economy class, carrying his own bags and haggling when doing the weekly shopping. “I see my task as serving the majority of people”, he said. “How do you find out what they want, how do you best serve them? My answer is to stay close to ordinary people, because at heart I am one of them.”

Kamprad’s being is perhaps best caught in in his own “Furniture Dealer’s Testament”, sometimes known as “The gospel according to Ikea”: maxims such as “Waste of resources is a mortal sin at Ikea” and “Happiness is not to reach one’s goal but to be on the way” testified to the strong Lutheran themes that underpinned this highly modern company.

Ingvar Kamprad, founder of Ikea, was born on March 30, 1926. He died on January 27, 2018, aged 91