Ingvar Kamprad

Feodor Ingvar Kamprad (30 March 1926 – 27 January 2018) was a Swedish billionaire businessman. In 1943 he founded IKEA, which by 2008 had become the world’s largest furniture retailer. Kamprad was born in Pjätteryd, in Småland, Sweden. His mother, Berta Linnea Matilda Nilsson, was Swedish; his father, Feodor Kamprad, was born in the German Empire and moved to Sweden a year later with his parents. The paternal grandfather, Achim Erdmann Kamprad, came from an aristocratic German family in Thuringia. His grandmother, Franzisca Glatz, was from a lower-class family in Bohemia. After seeing a magazine ad, Achim and Franzisca bought a timber estate near Agunnaryd, Sweden, and moved there in the winter of 1896 with their young children. The surname Kamprad, a variant of “Kamerade” (meaning “Comrade”), dates to the 14th century; by the 19th century the family were wealthy estate owners in Thuringia. Achim’s mother was a distant relative of Paul von Hindenburg. Achim, the younger son of an estate owner, bought the farm Elmtaryd near Agunnaryd—449 hectares, the largest farm in the area. He took his own life a few years after Feodor (Ingvar’s father) was born, leaving the farm to Franzisca and eventually to Feodor. From age six, Ingvar lived there with his parents, sister, and grandmother. He later visited the family’s ancestral town in Thuringia and stayed in touch with relatives there. Kamprad began selling matches at five. At seven he rode his bicycle farther to peddle to neighbors, buying matches in bulk cheaply in Stockholm and selling them individually at a low price for a profit. He expanded to fish, Christmas decorations, seeds, ballpoint pens, and pencils. At 17, his father gave him a cash reward for good grades. He attended Gothenburg’s Handelsinstitut from 1943 to 1945. In 1943, at 17, he founded IKEA at his uncle Ernst’s kitchen table. In 1948 he added furniture to his mostly mail-order business. The name IKEA combines his initials (Ingvar Kamprad) with Elmtaryd, the family farm, and Agunnaryd, the nearby village where he grew up. In June 2013, Kamprad resigned from the board of Inter IKEA Holding SA. His youngest son, Mathias Kamprad, replaced Per Ludvigsson as chairman. Kamprad, then 87, said it was a good time to step down as part of a generation shift. Mathias and his two older brothers, also in leadership roles, work on IKEA’s overall vision and long-term strategy. The Dutch-registered Stichting INGKA Foundation (named after Kamprad: ING + KA) owns INGKA Holding, the parent company for all IKEA stores. Kamprad chaired the foundation. In 2004, the Swedish weekly *Veckans Affärer* called him one of the world’s wealthiest people, but that assumed he owned the entire company—something IKEA and the Kamprad family rejected, as he had transferred his interest to the foundation. In March 2010, *Forbes* estimated his fortune at $23 billion, ranking him 11th richest globally. A year later he fell to 162nd after lawyers showed the foundation in Liechtenstein owns IKEA and its bylaws bar him and his family from benefiting. In June 2015, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index listed him as eighth wealthiest, with $58.7 billion; *Forbes* that March put his net worth at $3.5 billion. Though private, Kamprad published several works. In 1976 he detailed his philosophies of frugality and simplicity in *A Testament of a Furniture Dealer*. He also collaborated with Swedish journalist Bertil Torekull on *Leading by Design: The IKEA Story*, an autobiographical book covering his philosophies and IKEA’s founding. In 1994, the personal letters of Swedish fascist Per Engdahl were made public, revealing that Kamprad had joined Engdahl’s pro-fascist New Swedish Movement in 1942 at age 16 and remained active until at least September 1945. When he quit is unknown, but he stayed friends with Engdahl into the early 1950s. Kamprad devoted two chapters of *Leading by Design* to this period and, in a 1994 letter to IKEA employees, called it the “greatest mistake of my life.” He explained his teenage involvement as politically influenced by his father and grandmother in Sudet-Germany.