Ingvar Kamprad

Kamprad soon realised that with flat-pack furniture the manufacturers would pay less to deliver items and the consumer would spend less, because prices would reflect that they did some of the construction work themselves.

Ensuring that furniture was sourced cheaply was essential to the Ikea business model. Armchairs, coffee tables and sofa beds were produced by manufacturers in the forests near Elmtaryd, the family farm, and Kamprad saw the opportunity of becoming a furniture provider on a larger scale.

Yet he soon discovered that Swedish timber merchants were being urged by his rivals not to sell to him. He began travelling to Poland to source materials, using clandestine efforts to deliver the products. Despite price wars, boycotts and cartels — along with an alcohol addiction that he picked up from over-indulging in Polish vodka — Kamprad weathered the storm and Ikea’s expansion continued. The first showroom opened in Almhult, Sweden, in 1953.

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

The company’s policy 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. It also bridged classes. Viscount Linley, who makes high-end furniture, once told The Times that there was nothing wrong with Ikea: “You just have to put it together properly.”

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

The company introduced self-service in 1971, when its flagship store at Kungens Kurva in Stockholm reopened after a fire. Throughout that decade stores opened in Germany, Switzerland, Australia and Canada, and in 1987 the company opened its first British store in Warrington, Cheshire. The meatballs served in the stores were the idea of Kamprad, who worried that customers would get hungry while browsing in his massive warehouses.

Ikea’s 1996 advertisement — titled “chuck out the chintz” — showed just how influential the brand had become. It urged homemakers to embrace minimalism (“don’t let that doily . . . go and spoil everything”) and helped to awaken an appetite for clean, contemporary design.

Naresh Ramchandani, who wrote the song featured in the advertisement, told the design magazine Dezeen that the campaign had to “convert the UK’s sense of what homely is”. With Ikea’s website now listing 24 of the company’s stores and collection points in the UK as well as 314 Ikea stores across 38 countries, it would seem that the advertising team may have been on to something.

Yet the company’s accession to the top of the home-furnishings market was not without scandal. There were accusations that Ikea was plagiarising its competitors designs. These were not resolved until the company converted to a franchising model in 1986.

Demonstrating one of the company’s popular chairs in 1988

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In 1994 the Swedish media revealed that between 1945 and 1948, long after the atrocities of the Second World War had been revealed, Kamprad had attended pro-Nazi meetings in Sweden. 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.

His grandfather had committed suicide in 1897 when he could not pay the mortgage, but his grandmother, Franziska, saved the family farm from bankruptcy through hard work and willpower. The young Ingvar was close to his grandmother, whose world view was profoundly shaped by her conservative, Sudeten German legacy and her enthusiasm for Hitler.

Even as a boy Ingvar seemed to know that he wanted to develop a business. When he was only five years old he began 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, using the profits to buy a racing bike and a typewriter.

At 17, using a gift from his father, Kamprad registered a small company based on the concept of mail order. Ikea — its name formed from his own initials and the first letters of Elmtaryd and Agunnaryd, the village where he grew up — originally sold pens, wallets and nylon stockings. By 1948 Ikea was selling furniture by mail order.

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

Yet the business did not suffer. The following year Ikea published its first catalogue (the Ikea catalogue would one day have the world’s biggest print run) and Kamprad made his first million. In 1963 he married Margaretha Stennert, a teacher. She died in 2011 and he is survived by their three sons: Peter, Jonas and Mathias. Despite an interview with Forbes magazine in 2000 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 on to hold senior jobs at Ikea.

He took the family to Denmark in 1973, where they stayed for five years, before emigrating for tax purposes to a village near Lausanne in Switzerland. From the mid-1980s Kamprad gradually transferred power to his sons and his senior employees. Today Mathias is the chairman of the holding company. Under the new leadership Ikea expanded farther, including into new markets in eastern Europe, North America and Asia.

In 1992 Kamprad bought Habitat, the household furnishings company that had originally been one of its main competitors, from its founder, Sir Terence Conran, but he sold it in 2009.

Two years later he 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”. He returned to Sweden in 2014.

Kamprad willingly 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.”

He happily bought his clothes from flea markets and had his wife cut his hair, unless he opted to get it trimmed when visiting a developing country, where it was invariably cheap. He had only one extravagance, his own vineyard in Provence, which he admitted was a “very expensive hobby”.

Kamprad’s philosophy is perhaps best caught in his own “Furniture Dealer’s Testament”, sometimes known as “The gospel according to Ikea”. Its 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”, testify 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