Ingvar Kamprad

Ingvar Kamprad, the IKEA founder who turned a small-scale mail order business into a global furniture empire, has died at 91. Kamprad died Saturday January 27 2018 at his home in Smaland, southern Sweden. His work ethic, frugality and down-to-earth style remain at the core of its corporate identity today. But his missteps in life, including early flirtations with Nazism, never rubbed off on IKEA, one of the world's most recognizable brands. Kamprad formed the company's name from his own initials and the first letters of the family farm, Elmtaryd, and the parish of Agunnaryd where it is located. Born on March 30, 1926, Kamprad was a precocious entrepreneur who sold matchboxes to neighbors from his bicycle. He found that he could buy them in bulk very cheaply from Stockholm, and sell them at a low price but still make a good profit. Kamprad soon moved away from making individual sales calls and began advertising in local newspapers and operating a makeshift mail-order catalog. Since then the IKEA concept — keeping prices low by letting the customers assemble the furniture themselves — offers affordable home furnishings at stores across the globe. In 1994, Swedish newspaper Expressen reported that Kamprad had contacts with Swedish fascist leader Per Engdahl in the 1940s and '50s. In a letter to IKEA employees, Kamprad admitted that he once had sympathies for the far-right leader and called it "a part of my life which I bitterly regret." In the 1998 book, he gave more details about his youthful "delusions," saying he had been influenced as child by his German grandmother's strong support for Hitler. His paternal grandparents emigrated to Sweden in the 1890s. He moved to Switzerland in the late 1970s to avoid paying Swedish taxes, which at the time were the highest in the world. He decided to return home only after his wife Margaretha died in 2011. IKEA is owned by foundation that Kamprad created, whose statutes require profits to be reinvested in the company or donated to charity. The estate inventory showed that Kamprad had donated more than $20 million to philanthropic causes in 2012 alone. In June 2013, Kamprad announced that he would retire from the board which controls the IKEA brand as part of moves to hand responsibilities over to his son, Mathias. The Swedish billionaire is the year's biggest loser, down $17 billion to $6 billion. The drop from No. 11 to No. 162 has nothing to do with the value of his thriving retailer. He has fallen because his lawyers produced documents that prove the foundation he created, and heads, in tax haven Lichtenstein owns Ikea, and its bylaws bar him and his family from benefiting from its funds. The foundation, which gets royalty payments from Ikea's franchisees tax free, is valued at $12 billion but has only doled out $60 million to charity. Kamprad, who sold the business to the foundation years ago, gets his fortune from his investment firm, Ikano, run by his three sons.