Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of furniture giant Ikea, has died at the age of 91. Kamprad started selling matches at the age of five, buying them in bulk and selling them individually.
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/H.Proepper
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Ikea: 75 years of Ingvar Kamprad's Swedish modernism
From a mail-order sales business to locations in 51 countries. A look back at the history of the Swedish furniture giant and its legendary founder.
Image: picture-alliance/IBL Schweden
The man behind the legend
Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad has passed away at 91. A businessman since childhood, Kamprad founded Ikea as a mail-order sales business in 1943, when he was only 17. It wasn't until 1948 that the company began selling furniture. At his death, Kamprad was one of the richest men in the world.
Image: Inter IKEA Systems B.V. 2017
Kamprad's first profits
An exhibit from Sweden's Ikea museum, which opened in 2016, shows the box used by Kamprad to store earnings from one of his first businesses — selling fish to nearby farmers on his mother's bike. The museum is located at the site of the very first Ikea store in Almhult, Sweden.
Image: picture-alliance/IBL Schweden
The first furniture superstore
In 1953, Kamprad opened the first Ikea store in his hometown of Almhult. As interest and profits grew, the company expanded throughout Scandinavia, arriving in Norway in 1963 and Denmark in 1969.
Image: Inter IKEA Systems B.V. 2017
Do it yourself
Ikea is known for its bare-bones flat packaging, with customers usually required to assemble furniture themselves. This design helps keep costs down and allows for massive amounts of stock to be available in Ikea stores. On the left is the frame of a Poäng armchair. Ikea has produced 30 million of these chairs since they were introduced in 1978.
Image: Museum für Kommunikation Frankfurt
Children welcome
Seen here is an Ikea collection from the 1970s. Pine was, as it is now, a mainstay of Ikea style — as well as bright colors and kid-friendly design. Today, German represents the furniture giant's biggest market with 53 stores. For comparison, the entire United States has 45.
Image: Inter IKEA Systems B.V. 2017
World famous
Over the decades, Ikea has expanded to 51 countries, and has plans to build stores in 10 more in the next few years. The biggest Ikea in the world is in Gwangmyeong, South Korea and is 57,100 square meters (614,619 sq ft) in size. Seen above is the opening of the Ikea in Moscow in March 2000, an event that drew a crowd of 30,000 people.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/Feferberg
Under fire
Ikea has come under fire numerous times — for its symbolic association with post-World War II consumer culture (famously lampooned in the book and film 'Fight Club'), and for its business practices, such as being registered as a charity. In 2015, Italian Ikea employees demonstrated outside the Swedish embassy in Rome over low wages.
Image: picture-alliance/CITYPRESS 24
Charitable work
Over the years, Ikea has been involved in a number of philanthropic causes, and regularly donates large sums to UNICEF and Save the Children. Here, refugees in Iraq are housed in Ikea 'Better Shelter' housing.
Image: Better Shelter.org/2015 Erik Hagman
Unavoidable Ikea
Some Ikea products are so ubiquitous they are easily recognizable by name, such as the Billy bookcase. In 2009, Ikea said that it had sold 41 million Billy shelves since 1979, making it the most popular piece of furniture in the world.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/A. Dedert
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The furniture store on Sunday announced the death of founder Ingvar Kamprad, saying he had passed away at his home in southern Sweden.
"The founder of Ikea and Ikano, and one of the greatest entrepreneurs of the 20th century, Ingvar Kamprad, has peacefully passed away, at his home in Smaland, Sweden, on the 27th of January," the company said in a press release.
"Ingvar will be very missed and warmly remembered by his family and Ikea colleagues around the world," the release said.
Kamprad was still a teenager when he founded Ikea in 1943, but it wasn't until 1956 that he struck proverbial gold when he realized that saving space meant saving money.
His aha moment came when he saw an employee taking the legs off a table to fit it into a customer's car. That sparked Ikea's move towards so-called "flat-pack" furniture. But the task of self-assembly became increasingly dreaded by Ikea's customers, and the company responded just four months ago by purchasing an assembly startup known as TaskRabbit.
The retail giant is now approaching $62 billion (50 billion euros) in annual revenues.
Striking out with matches
Kamprad was born March 30, 1926, and began selling matches at the age of five. He quickly discovered that he could buy the matches in bulk, even at retail prices, and still turn a profit by selling them in small quantities in his neighborhood.
He soon branched out and began selling seeds, Christmas tree decorations, pencils and ballpoint pens.
The "Ikea" name is an acronym, combining his initials with those of the family farm — Elmtaryd — and the nearby village — Agunnaryd.
"Ingvar Kamprad was a great entrepreneur of the typical southern Swedish kind - hard working and stubborn, with a lot of warmth and a playful twinkle in his eye," the company said.
"He worked until the very end of his life, staying true to his own motto that most things remain to be done."
Ingvar Kamprad founded Ikea in 1943Image: Inter IKEA Systems B.V. 2017
Taxes and the Nazis
In 1973, he left Sweden's high tax rates for Denmark before eventually finding lower tax rates in Switzerland, where he settled.
Beginning in 2010, Kamprad began to transfer power and control of the company to his three sons, and finally returned to live in Sweden in 2014 — shortly after he announced that he would be stepping down from the company board and that his youngest son would become board chairman.
That same year the Consortium of Investigative Journalists (CJI) uncovered leaked tax files from Luxembourg that identified Ikea as one of the giant multinational firms engaged in corporate tax avoidance by squirreling away money into offshore tax havens. Last year, the European Commission launched an investigation into Ikea's tax deals in the Netherlands.
The company insists it has fully complied with all national and international tax laws.
Kamprad was also known for his ties to the Swedish Nazi party when he was young. Sweden remained neutral during World War II, but its Nazi party remained active beyond the end of the war. Kamprad claimed he stopped attending party meetings in 1948.
Ikea is known for its build-your-own furnitureImage: Getty Images/AFP/J. Nackstrand
