Ingvar Kamprad

Ingvar Kamprad grew up on a farm called Elmtaryd near the village of Agunnaryd in Småland, a poor, stony region of southern Sweden whose people pride themselves on making do. At five he discovered he could buy matches cheaply in bulk from Stockholm and sell them at a profit from his bicycle. He moved on to seeds, Christmas cards, pens and fish.

In 1943, at 17, he registered a company using his initials and the first letters of the farm and the village: IKEA. His father gave him the start-up money as a reward for good school marks. He sold by mail order, and in 1948 added furniture made by local carpenters.

Three things shaped what followed. A price war with rivals led him to open a showroom so customers could see the quality for themselves. In 1956 an employee, Gillis Lundgren, took the legs off a table to fit it in his car, and the flat-pack idea was born, cutting shipping costs and letting customers do the assembly. And when Swedish furniture makers, pressured by competitors, boycotted him, he went to Poland in 1961 and found suppliers who would build to his prices. The boycott meant to kill the company made it international.

He was famous for frugality: flying economy, driving an old Volvo, reusing tea bags, and writing a 1976 pamphlet, "The Testament of a Furniture Dealer", that still sets the company's culture. His record has a stain. In 1994 it emerged that as a young man in the 1940s he had been involved with a Swedish pro-Nazi movement, which he called "the greatest mistake of my life" and apologised for publicly. He stepped back from the business in his eighties and died in 2018 at 91, with IKEA operating more than 400 stores worldwide.