Who Founded IKEA?

IKEA possesses a unique, frugal founding story, rooted in the harsh, demanding agricultural environment of rural Sweden and the lifelong obsession of a single, eccentric entrepreneur with driving down costs. The company was founded in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad, an ambitious, 17-year-old boy growing up on the Elmtaryd farm in the stony, impoverished parish of Agunnaryd in Småland, Sweden. (The company name is an acronym: Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd). Kamprad possessed a foundational obsession with trading and retail from childhood, famously buying quantities of matches in Stockholm and selling them individually to his neighbors for a tiny profit. He started IKEA using a modest sum of money his father gave him for doing well in school. Initially, the business was small; he sold mundane goods like pens, wallets, and nylon stockings via mail order, famously utilizing the local milk truck to deliver his rudimentary catalogs. The defining pivot into furniture occurred in 1948. However, the world-changing key move occurred in 1956. The expensive problem with selling furniture via mail order was the high cost of shipping fully assembled tables which were frequently damaged in transit. According to corporate legend, an early IKEA designer named Gillis Lundgren was desperately trying to fit a wooden table into his tiny car, and out of sheer frustration, he pulled the legs off to make it fit. Kamprad had an epiphany: 'flat-packing.' By designing all furniture to be easily assembled by the consumer at home, Kamprad destroyed the transportation and warehousing costs that plagued the traditional industry, transforming a tiny Swedish mail-order business into the largest, global furniture retailer in history.

Ingvar Kamprad was born in 1926 in Pjätteryd.