Biography of Ingvar Kamprad

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With 154,000 co-workers and stores in 44 different countries, generating annual sales of more than 21.5 billion euro, it is one of the largest and most successful, privately held companies in the world. The brand is so powerful and iconic that people recognize it immediately, while not really knowing the genius behind it. You may wonder what is this brand. The brand I am talking about is IKEA. And today, I am going to present this iconic brand’s founder and his way to such worldwide success. ***The IKEA story began in 1943 in the small village of Agunnaryd in Sweden, by ambitious and smart kid Ingvar Kamprad. Ingvar Kamprad was born in 1926 in Sweden. At an early age of about 5, he learned that he could buy matches in bulk from Stockholm and re-sell them individually at a fair price at home, while still making a nice profit. While school peers spent their time at football fields and dating with girls, Ingvar Kamprad was thinking about how to expand the business. At age 17, Kamprad borrowed money from his father by convincing him that money is for son’s studies. What did he spend it on? He founded IKEA. ***The name IKEA stands for Kamprad’s initials (I.K.) plus the first letters of Elmtaryd and Agunnaryd, the farm and village where he grew up. At first he expanded his business to a variety of goods including wallets, watches, jewelery and stockings – everything you need at low prices. After 3 years, Kamprad introduced furniture into the IKEA product line. In five years, furniture sales were so successful, that Ingvar decided to drop all other products and focus only on the furniture line.*** He started spreading booklets among its customers called ‘IKEA News’, which till nowadays is IKEA’s catalog. Business was targeted to customers with medium and low incomes. For this, he ordered cheap furniture at local furniture factories. It was then when he invented his

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