Ingvar Kamprad

Feodor Ingvar Kamprad (30 March 1926 – 27 January 2018) was a Swedish billionaire businessman. In 1943, at age 17, he founded IKEA, which by 2008 had become the world’s largest furniture retailer.

Kamprad was born in Pjätteryd, in Småland, Sweden, to Feodor Kamprad and Berta Linnea Matilda Nilsson. His mother was Swedish; his father was born in the German Empire and moved to Sweden as an infant with his parents. Kamprad’s paternal grandfather, Achim Erdmann Kamprad, came from an aristocratic German family in Thuringia, while his grandmother, Franzisca Glatz, was born into 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” (comrade), dates to the 14th century; by the 19th century the family were wealthy Thuringian estate owners. Achim’s mother was a distant relative of Paul von Hindenburg. Achim, a younger son, bought the farm Elmtaryd near Agunnaryd—at 449 hectares, the largest farm in the area. He died by suicide a few years after Feodor (Ingvar’s father) was born, leaving the farm to Franzisca and eventually to Feodor. From age six, Kamprad 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 age five. At seven, he bicycled farther to peddle to neighbors, buying matches cheaply in bulk in Stockholm and selling them individually at a low price for profit. He expanded to fish, Christmas decorations, seeds, ballpoint pens, and pencils. At 17, his father rewarded him with cash for good grades. From 1943 to 1945, he attended Gothenburg’s Handelsinstitut. In 1943, he founded IKEA at his uncle Ernst’s kitchen table. By 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 left the board of Inter IKEA Holding SA; his youngest son, Mathias Kamprad, replaced Per Ludvigsson as chairman. Kamprad called it a good time to step down, part of a generation shift. Mathias and his two older brothers, also in leadership roles, work on the corporation’s long-term vision and strategy.

The Dutch