Ingvar Kamprad

Ingvar Kamprad was a Swedish businessman who founded IKEA in 1943 at the age of seventeen, initially as a mail-order business selling pens, wallets and other small goods before moving into furniture and developing the flat-pack, ready-to-assemble format that became the company's hallmark. He built IKEA into the world's largest furniture retailer, structured through a complex arrangement of foundations and holding companies based in the Netherlands that he said was designed to secure the company's independence, and was for decades counted among the wealthiest people in the world despite a famously frugal personal lifestyle. He stepped back from IKEA's day-to-day management in the 1980s and died in January 2018.