Meet Ingvar Kamprad – the playful businessman
The story of Ingvar Kamprad is the story of Småland and Sweden. To understand Ingvar Kamprad and IKEA, we must go back to the Ice Age. It was then that a crucial event occurred, shaping Ingvar Kamprad’s entrepreneurship: the glaciers filled Småland with stones.
Generation after generation, farmers struggled every year to make the land arable. Each winter’s frost brought new stones to the surface, no matter how many had been cleared the previous year. From this necessity, entrepreneurship was born – the art of making much from little. The stones became walls around the farmers’ fields, and the forests were used to create homes and furniture.
From pens to furniture
In 1943, a young and energetic 17-year-old registered the company IKEA. Ingvar Kamprad from Elmtaryd, Agunnaryd. But he didn’t start with flat-pack furniture. And he definitely didn’t start by creating an empire. He started with something much smaller: pens.
In the late 1940s, after both successes and setbacks, Ingvar heard that his biggest competitor – Gunnars Fabriker in Alvesta – had begun selling furniture successfully. By then, Ingvar had realized that his future did not lie in selling pens. But furniture, that might be something worth pursuing? With furniture makers in every corner of Småland, the step from importing pens from Paris to wooden furniture from Småland was actually quite logical. The opportunity was there – right in front of Ingvar, in his childhood forests.
Read more at the IKEA Museum website.
