THE MAN WHO GAVE US IKEA.

1 WHAT HAPPENED?

Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of Ikea, the Swedish furniture giant, has died at aged 91. He was an idiosyncratic and austere boss, with no time for formality or hierarchy: he dressed casually, flew economy class, and told his 150,000 staff in 41 countries to “call me Ingvar.”

2 HOW DID HE GET STARTED?

Born in the Smaland province of Sweden on March 30, 1926, his grandparents had migrated from the Sudetenland. At 17, he started selling fish, pencils, jewelry and nylons door-to-door. He developed a local mail-order business, and in 1948 he ventured into cheap furniture. He christened his fledgling business Ikea — his own initials coupled with those of the name of the farm, Elmtaryd, and the village, Agunnaryd. His first advertising slogan was “Not for the rich. But for the wise.”

3 DID HE HAVE NAZI CONNECTIONS?

Ingvar’s grandmother saved the family from bankruptcy after her husband’s death by sheer hard work, and in later years became a keen admirer of Adolf Hitler. Under her influence, Ingvar joined a neo-Nazi group at the end of the Second World War, though he later described his involvement as “the sins of my youth” which he “bitterly regretted.”

4 WHAT LAY BEHIND IKEA’S SUCCESS?

Cost-control was the core of his business formula: “Waste of resources is a mortal sin at Ikea” was one of the maxims he promulgated.

5 WHAT IS THE CHAIN’S IMPACT?

There was no doubting Ikea’s extraordinary success, and its influence on contemporary domestic style. The clean, efficient lines of an Ikea table or bookcase reflected the trends of 20th-century European design, and the democratic affordability of Ikea products was an integral part of the group’s ethos.