Founder of IKEA
Built the world's biggest furniture retailer by designing the price first and the product afterwards.
Photograph: Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and Communications of Sweden/Sandra Baqirjazid · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Kamprad started selling small goods as a teenager in rural Sweden and registered IKEA in 1943, moving into furniture later that decade. When Swedish manufacturers boycotted him under pressure from competitors, he sourced from Poland instead — cheaper, and the beginning of a supply chain built for cost.
The flat pack is the part everyone knows, and the story that a colleague took the legs off a table to fit it in a car is part of company lore. What matters commercially is what flat packing removed: air from lorries, assembly labour from the factory, and damage from handling.
IKEA's method was to fix the retail price at the start and then design a product that could be made and shipped to hit it. That reverses the usual order, where cost is totted up and a margin added. It forces every decision — material, joint, packaging, number of screws — to justify itself against a number the customer has already been promised.
Deciding the price first turns design into a series of small, answerable questions. Deciding it last turns it into an argument.
Set the number the customer will pay before you build the thing, then work backwards through what it can contain. It is uncomfortable, and it is the single most useful discipline for a small business quoting work: it stops you building a specification you then have to defend at a price nobody wanted to pay.
Flat packing worked because a lorry of assembled furniture is mostly empty space. The equivalent in most businesses is less literal — vans running half empty, engineers driving between jobs, stock sitting in the wrong place. Look for what you are paying to move that is not the thing you sell.
IKEA moved assembly to the customer and paid them for it in a lower price. That trade only works when the customer genuinely minds less than you do. Applied badly it is just cost-shifting that annoys people, so the test is whether the customer would accept the swap if you described it out loud.
Kamprad had involvement with a Swedish pro-Nazi movement as a young man in the 1940s, which became public in the 1990s. He called it the greatest mistake of his life and wrote to employees apologising. It is part of the record and belongs in any honest profile.
The corporate structure IKEA adopted — built around foundations in the Netherlands and Liechtenstein — also drew sustained criticism over tax and over how little of it could be scrutinised from outside. Structuring aggressively is legal, common and reputationally expensive; the cost tends to arrive later than the saving.