Ingvar Kamprad started a small mail-order sales business as a teenager in rural Sweden in 1943, selling various small goods before shifting focus to furniture, at a time when he was also managing undiagnosed dyslexia that made working with the long strings of numbers used in standard furniture catalog and inventory systems genuinely difficult.
Rather than forcing himself to work around the numbering conventions the rest of the furniture industry used, he made an unconventional decision: naming products with words instead of model numbers — Scandinavian first names and place names — a system that was easier for him personally to remember and manage, and which also happened to make the catalog more approachable and memorable for customers.
He also pursued flat-pack, self-assembly furniture design as a way to cut manufacturing and shipping costs dramatically, an idea reportedly inspired by watching an employee remove the legs from a table to fit it into a car — a practical shortcut that became a foundational part of the company's entire business model.
The company he founded, IKEA, grew into the largest furniture retailer in the world, and Kamprad remained known throughout his life for an unusually frugal personal lifestyle despite his wealth, driving an old car and flying economy class, treating cost discipline as a value that applied to himself as much as to the products he sold.