IKEA Started With a Teenager's Reward for Good Grades

Ingvar Kamprad grew up on a farm called Elmtaryd, near the village of Agunnaryd, in the Småland region of southern Sweden. He was born on March 30, 1926, and he was selling things almost as soon as he could count.

At about five he started selling matches to neighbors. According to the Associated Press obituary, he had worked out that he could buy matches in bulk very cheaply in Stockholm, sell them one box at a time at a low price and still make a good profit. He went on to seeds, greeting cards, Christmas tree decorations, and later pencils and pens, using a bicycle to reach new customers.

1943: A reward from his father

When Kamprad was 17, his father gave him a cash reward for doing well at school. He used it to start a business. On July 28, 1943, he registered IKEA as a trading company. The name is his initials plus the first letters of the farm and the village: Ingvar Kamprad, Elmtaryd, Agunnaryd.

The first IKEA was not a furniture company. It was a mail-order business for small goods. Kamprad advertised in local newspapers and ran a makeshift catalog, and, the AP reported, sent orders out with the local milk van, which took them to the nearby train station.

Furniture followed within a few years, made by local manufacturers in the forests near his home. It sold, but it created a problem that small goods never had.

1956: The table that would not fit

Furniture was hard to send by mail. IKEA’s own heritage page says mail-order distribution of bulky furniture was difficult and expensive, and products were often damaged on the way.

The company’s answer is told through one table. In 1956 Gillis Lundgren, a draftsman who was one of IKEA’s first employees, had to take the LÖVET table to a catalog photo shoot and could not fit it in his car. He took the legs off. IKEA says this led to the idea of self-assembly and flat packing, and that the change saved both space and cost.

The story is tidier than the history. Ready-to-assemble furniture existed well before 1956, and IKEA’s museum has documented earlier flat-pack products, including some from IKEA itself. Guinness World Records still credits Lundgren with inventing flat-pack furniture. The safer reading is that 1956 is when IKEA began building its whole system around flat packs, not the day the idea was born.

1958: The store

In 1958 the first IKEA store opened in Älmhult, in Småland. A restaurant followed there in 1960.

The model moved slowly at first and then spread. The first IKEA outside Sweden opened in Norway in 1963. On June 12, 1985, the first US store opened in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania. Furniture Today later reported that it drew about 150,000 shoppers a week at first.

Kamprad wrote down his thinking in 1976 in A Testament of a Furniture Dealer, a short manifesto on frugality and simplicity. His record was not spotless. In 1994 the Swedish newspaper Expressen reported that as a young man he had been in contact with a Swedish fascist leader. Kamprad admitted the sympathies and called that period a part of his life he bitterly regretted. He died on January 27, 2018, aged 91.

€44.6 billion, and falling on purpose

IKEA today is a franchise system. Inter IKEA owns the brand and the concept, and groups of franchisees run the stores. In the fiscal year to August 31, 2025, total IKEA retail sales across all franchisees were about €44.6 billion, down 1% from the year before.

The fall was deliberate. Ingka Group, the largest franchisee, reported IKEA retail sales of €39 billion, down 1.6%, while the number of items it sold rose 1.6% and store visits rose to 736 million. It had cut prices. The boy who sold matches cheaply in order to sell more of them would have recognized the trade.

What the record shows

• The first business held the whole idea. Buying in bulk and selling cheaply one item at a time was the boy’s model, and it became IKEA’s.
• A cost problem became the product. Shipping bulky, breakable furniture was expensive, so IKEA made the box flat and handed the assembly to the customer.
• Scale mattered more than invention. Flat-pack furniture existed before IKEA. IKEA’s advantage was building stores, catalogs and prices around it.
• Low prices can shrink revenue. In 2025 IKEA sold more items to more visitors and still took in less money.

Other founders in this archive built empires on a narrow cost advantage. Amancio Ortega built Zara around speed, and Sam Walton built Walmart around low prices in small towns. In Sweden, Ruben Rausing’s Tetra Pak made its fortune from a cheaper way to package milk.