Entrepreneur founded IKEA, making him multibillionaire
Ingvar Kamprad, born poor, started company at age 17.
Ingvar Kamprad, a Swedish entrepreneur who became one of the world’s richest men by turning simply-designed, low-cost furniture into the global IKEA empire, died Saturday at his home in Smaland, Sweden. He was 91.
His death was confirmed by the company in a statement on Sunday.
He grew up on a farm in the lake-dotted province of Smaland, in southern Sweden, a dyslexic boy who milked cows and found it hard to concentrate in school. His family was poor, and he earned money selling matches and pencils in villages. At 17, he registered his mail-order business in household goods, calling it IKEA, formed of his initials and those of his farm, Elmtaryd, and village, Agunnaryd.
During the next seven decades, Kamprad built IKEA into the world’s largest furniture retailer — an archipelago of more than 350 stores in 29 countries across Europe, North America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and Asia, with sales of $47.6 billion.
It made him wealthy beyond imagining. Bloomberg Billionaires Index listed him as the world’s eighth-richest person, worth $58.7 billion. But his driving ambition led to alcoholism, years of fascination with fascism and, trying to lead his employees by example, into a life of almost monastic frugalities.
Kamprad was, like his designer wares, a studied Everyman. He cultivated a provincial openness: curious about everything, but a face lost in the crowd. He was bespectacled and balding, with wisps of graying hair plastered down the sides, jowls and a pointed chin. His blue denim shirts and khaki pants might have been a gardener’s, but there was hard individuality in the dark eyes and compressed lips.
While he lived mostly in seclusion, he traveled to IKEA stores around the world, sometimes strolling in anonymously and questioning employees as if he were a customer, and customers as if he were a solicitous employee. He spoke at IKEA board meetings and occasionally lectured at universities. He rarely gave interviews, but made no secret of his alcoholism, saying he controlled it by drying out three times a year.
To millions of IKEA customers and the general public, he was largely unknown beyond the authorized version of his life and IKEA’s success — his “Leading by Design: The IKEA Story” (1999), written with Bertil Torekull. Its themes had been sounded for decades in IKEA publicity and reiterated in profiles of Kamprad and the company.
IKEA had been achieved, he said, by frugality: building stores on less costly land outside cities; buying materials at a discount and minimizing sales staff to let customers shop without pressure.