Ingvar Kamprad, every mention
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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Ingvar Kamprad comes up
Epic Systems (MyChart) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:27:46 Ben Gilbert She is singularly focused on making Epic great in her life, just like Ingvar Kamprad and Ikea.
Mars Inc. - The Chocolate Story (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 52:56 Ben Gilbert You look at Ingvar, you look at Sam Walton, you look at Buffett.
IKEA (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 6:11 David Rosenthal And so, it is there, on a farm in Smolland, in March of 1926, when our protagonist, Feodor Ingvar Kamprad, or just Ingvar, as he is known, is born.
- ▶ 7:58 David Rosenthal So, Ingvar's grandmother and grandfather had immigrated there to small land from Germany.
- ▶ 8:03 David Rosenthal Only 30 years before Ingvar was born, so in 1896.
- ▶ 8:51 David Rosenthal Ingvar's grandfather, H.M., had been connected to the timber trade in Germany, so the idea makes sense on paper.
- ▶ 8:59 David Rosenthal Unfortunately, though, it doesn't work out, and the next year after they immigrate, in 1897, Ingvar's grandfather, H.M., commits suicide.
- ▶ 9:37 Ben Gilbert Something I read alluded to the idea that Ingvar's grandfather committed suicide basically out of poverty.
- ▶ 11:36 David Rosenthal So Franz Feodor and his new wife, Berta, they have two young sons, the elder of whom is Feodor Ingvar Kamprad, our protagonist here.
- ▶ 11:45 David Rosenthal They arrive at the farm, and this is where Ingvar Kamprad, the founder, purveyor, janitor, sole embodiment of IKEA grows up.
- ▶ 11:54 David Rosenthal I mean, really, we say this on a lot of episodes, but Ingvar is IKEA, as we shall see.
- ▶ 12:26 David Rosenthal So, when Ingvar is super young, like, five years old, this merchant side of his DNA starts to come through and blossom.
- ▶ 12:37 David Rosenthal Helps young Ingvar buy bulk sets of matchboxes mail order from Stockholm, the capital of Sweden.
- ▶ 12:45 David Rosenthal Ingvar, little Ingvar, five-year-old, then goes around the countryside selling individual matchboxes to other farms and other families in the area at like a three X markup from what he got them unit price in the bulk package from Stockholm.
- ▶ 13:35 David Rosenthal Jim Senegal, Saul Price, Jeff Bezos, Ingrid Comrade.
- ▶ 13:41 David Rosenthal So young Ingvar, he gets a taste of this.
- ▶ 15:14 David Rosenthal That is the only money that Ingvar would ever raise.
- ▶ 15:22 Ben Gilbert Ingvar always owned a hundred percent of Ikea.
- ▶ 17:26 David Rosenthal Okay, so in 1943, when Ingvar is 17, he's about to go off to the equivalent of college at the School of Commerce in Gothenburg, which is a much bigger city in Sweden.
- ▶ 17:43 David Rosenthal And, uh, Ingvar decides that before he goes, he wants to officially start a company, like a firm, to formalize all of his trading activities that he's been doing,
- ▶ 18:01 Ben Gilbert And there is one other thing happening during this period of time in Ingvar's life.
- ▶ 18:23 David Rosenthal Ingvar Kamprad Elmterud Agunyard.
- ▶ 18:51 David Rosenthal That's Inkbar Comrade's trading firm.
- ▶ 19:20 David Rosenthal So, Ingvar goes off to the School of Commerce, and for the first time there, he's able to do what I think he intended, which was get access in the school library to real, actual trade publications.
- ▶ 22:20 David Rosenthal Now, here in the, call it mid-nineteenforties, this is not a new innovation that young Ingvar is coming up with.
- ▶ 22:59 David Rosenthal So, Ingvar creates a, you know, catalog of his wares called Ikea News.
- ▶ 23:44 David Rosenthal And then in 1948, Ingvar makes a fateful, but again, not unique decision.
- ▶ 24:00 David Rosenthal Now, other competitors of his, other rural focused mail order businesses and dealers offered furniture at the time, and that's actually why Ingvar starts doing it too.
- ▶ 25:19 David Rosenthal So Ingvar goes around to local small land furniture makers and asks if he can be their agent.
- ▶ 25:40 David Rosenthal Now, famously, and this is part of the lore about Ingvar and
- ▶ 26:52 David Rosenthal Well, regardless of its veracity or not, Ingvar does not like remembering product numbers and codes in catalog, so he decides that he is going to give a name and not a product code or number to all these furniture pieces.
- ▶ 28:06 David Rosenthal Ingvar, if he truly was dyslexic, would now be having a tough time with all of this.
- ▶ 28:11 David Rosenthal So anyway, Ingvar decides that he's gonna start all this off with his, you know, named pieces of furniture in the Ikea catalog that, again, are not his furniture.
- ▶ 28:56 David Rosenthal And Ingvar, of course, he's a traitor.
- ▶ 29:38 David Rosenthal Before mail order, the only way that people out in the countryside could get furniture that wasn't locally made right there or passed down from generations, but still it had to get made and bought at some point in time, was through dealers…
- ▶ 31:00 David Rosenthal Ingmar, though, because of his history in small goods and as a importer, he's got a very different mindset.
- ▶ 32:46 David Rosenthal Ingvar and the other folks who are doing this has just expanded their market.
- ▶ 32:57 David Rosenthal So within a couple months, Ingvar is getting so many orders from customers and so many furniture makers who want to be in the catalog that he's like, okay, we got to just focus on furniture.
- ▶ 33:22 David Rosenthal And then, in 1949, Ingvar decides to go really big.
- ▶ 34:14 David Rosenthal Ingvar goes big.
- ▶ 34:43 David Rosenthal So I think once Ingvar's got your address and knows who you are, you're in his CRM, so to speak, now I think you're getting his catalog directly.
- ▶ 36:57 David Rosenthal A little later, we're going to talk about this amazing document that Ingvar writes in 1976 called The Testament of a Furniture Dealer.
- ▶ 37:31 David Rosenthal Now, the interesting question, though, here and for the rest of the episode is, like we said, Ingvar is not the only mail order furniture company at this point.
- ▶ 42:41 Ben Gilbert And so, even though Ingvar is focused on quality furniture at the lowest possible prices, the fact that other people aren't is hurting him because it's hurting consumer trust.
- ▶ 45:05 David Rosenthal What Ingvar is doing here, they're opening a showroom in one singular remote part of this country, you know, in a town with like a thousand people who live there and their business model is to sell to the other towns of a thousand people…
- ▶ 45:36 David Rosenthal So Ingvar advertises that they are opening this for months leading up to the actual opening, which is in March of 1953.
- ▶ 46:08 David Rosenthal Ingvar and the team, like, they're so worried about this that they don't know that the floorboards on the second floor of this old joinery are like, you know, it's like an old building here that are, like, gonna stand up to a thousand…
- ▶ 46:51 Ben Gilbert So Ingvar has a quote about this.
- ▶ 47:41 David Rosenthal So, this is, I think, and Ingvar thinks, and he writes this, this is the very first time anywhere in the world that a mail order business is combined with a physical showroom.
- ▶ 49:00 Ben Gilbert I mean, it hadn't quite made the shift yet, but especially in the sixties after Britta Lange took over from Ingvar, because Ingvar is like everything right now.
- ▶ 58:00 David Rosenthal So, Ingvar, the company, they're like, alright, well, how are we gonna design our way out of this one?
- ▶ 58:43 David Rosenthal Now, the first quote unquote designer who Engvar sets to work on this is a former advertising draftsman named Gillis Lundgren.
- ▶ 58:53 David Rosenthal And Ingvar had hired him originally to help Ingvar do the set layout and the photo shoots for the catalog as his, like, assisting.
- ▶ 59:15 David Rosenthal Lundgren and Ingvar are taking down the set from a photo shoot, and Lundgren says while he's putting a table away, he's like,
- ▶ 59:33 David Rosenthal And Ingvar is like a bolt of lightning has hit him.
- ▶ 1:03:24 Ben Gilbert Another research call was with Bjorn Bailey, who ran Ikea in the U.S. in the late eighties, and he mentioned that Ingvar always looked up to Costco and thought they were, like, the greatest retailer in the world, so there's a lot of shared…
- ▶ 1:04:07 David Rosenthal So legend has it that right around this time, as the whole IKEA range is shifting to flat pack, Ingvar goes on a trip to the Milan furniture show in Italy.
- ▶ 1:04:21 David Rosenthal And while he's there, one of the suppliers, a carpet supplier at the fair, offers to take him around the city, and, you know, Ingvar wants to see how people live, and he's like, sure, like, I'll ask a bunch of my employees who work in my…
- ▶ 1:04:41 David Rosenthal And so Ingvar goes into their apartments, and he's just appalled by, like, the furniture that he sees there, and how different it is from the
- ▶ 1:05:03 David Rosenthal And so, supposedly, this is the moment when Ingvar really gets religion of like,
- ▶ 1:07:02 David Rosenthal So Ingmar writes to this, he says, a design that was not just good, implied unlike what the Milan factory workers previously had in their homes, but also from the start adapted to machine production,
- ▶ 1:08:16 David Rosenthal So, Ingvar starts looking around elsewhere in Europe to expand supplier production, and then in 1960, Ingvar reads in the Swedish newspaper that the foreign minister of Poland is coming to visit the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce with the…
- ▶ 1:08:52 David Rosenthal And Ingvar is like, well, you know, if we could find a way to work with the communists, we could probably lock up a lot of production capacity that nobody else is gonna go through the trouble of getting.
- ▶ 1:11:28 David Rosenthal The LAC coffee table is the first example of this idea that Ingvar starts to develop of the item with the breathtaking price, quote unquote.
- ▶ 1:12:28 David Rosenthal And so, Ingvar says, like, it's our job to figure out, you know, start with that end goal in mind.
- ▶ 1:14:15 David Rosenthal So, later, once he, like Charlie Munger, got turned on to the virtues of Costco, Ingvar would hilariously formalize this idea, this manifesto, in 1995 as the hot dog product policy.
- ▶ 1:16:18 David Rosenthal There's no freaking way that Ingvar wasn't just like, alright, we gotta copy the hot dog.
- ▶ 1:16:25 David Rosenthal The even more amazing thing is he codifies this into the official policy of the company, which is we must have at least, at first it's 10 quote unquote hot dog products across the range.
- ▶ 1:16:37 David Rosenthal He later ups it to 20, and it's, yes, it's like the lack table.
- ▶ 1:19:52 David Rosenthal I think Ingvar probably have viewed that as a short-term optimization, and that is, like, antithetical to how he wants to run the business.
- ▶ 1:24:05 David Rosenthal I think at Ikea, it's Ingvar, just his background in being religiously opposed to losing money.
- ▶ 1:28:42 David Rosenthal It costs seventeen million kroner to build, or roughly three million dollars, compared with the original Almud location that Ingvar bought for 13,000 kroner.
- ▶ 1:32:02 David Rosenthal But I think this is really part of the culture of IKEA, the company, and certainly Ingvar's mindset is like, every challenge is an opportunity.
- ▶ 1:36:09 David Rosenthal I mean, Ingvar totally got conviction that the newly redesigned store in Stockholm was it, and we were gonna copy paste it and bring it everywhere.
- ▶ 1:37:08 Ben Gilbert This is the same guy, like, just to quote the testament of a furniture dealer, this is like one of my favorite paragraphs.
- ▶ 1:37:13 Ben Gilbert Ingvar writes, it is not all that difficult to reach set targets if you do not have to count the cost.
- ▶ 1:38:24 David Rosenthal So, in the seventies, during this, you know, decade of blitzscaling, if you will, for Ikea, Ingvar is in his early fifties, and for a couple reasons, as the company is doing this massive scaling outside of
- ▶ 1:39:11 David Rosenthal The comp rad and estate and Ikea as an asset would definitely be one was over 60%.
- ▶ 1:40:14 David Rosenthal So actually, at the end of his life, Ingvar moves back to small land, moves back to Sweden.
- ▶ 1:40:23 David Rosenthal Anyway, this kicks off for Ingvar and the Comprads a whole saga of wealth, succession, corporate planning that ultimately has a huge impact on the company.
- ▶ 1:40:43 David Rosenthal Ingvar and his family emigrate to Denmark first to avoid the wealth tax, and then a couple years later in 1978, they settle in Switzerland.
- ▶ 1:40:53 David Rosenthal Now, Ingvar actually has multiple goals here, though.
- ▶ 1:41:26 David Rosenthal The political history of Europe that Ingvar lived through and that we're going to talk about later is case in point here, right?
- ▶ 1:42:25 Ben Gilbert I heard a funny quote indirectly from someone who told me that Ingvar once said, going public is a little like wetting your pants.
- ▶ 1:46:19 David Rosenthal The Comprad family, at least after Ingvar dies, the Comprad family will be involved, but does not have ultimate control or voting power over either of these companies.
- ▶ 1:46:49 David Rosenthal And that was super important to Ingvar.
- ▶ 1:47:23 David Rosenthal That is exactly what Ingvar is doing here.
- ▶ 1:49:25 David Rosenthal Done, and Ingvar and the family no longer directly own the company.
- ▶ 1:49:31 David Rosenthal In 1976, he writes this document that is intended to serve as sort of a, like, forever operating system of the company.
- ▶ 1:49:46 David Rosenthal And he titles it, The Testament of a Furniture Dealer, as we've talked about.
- ▶ 1:49:50 David Rosenthal And it literally, like, he's treating this like it's his last will and testament.
- ▶ 1:49:54 David Rosenthal Even though he stays involved in the business for another 42 years and hands on the whole time.
- ▶ 1:50:43 David Rosenthal He continues.
- ▶ 1:52:37 Ben Gilbert Yeah, there's so much good stuff in this document, just to illustrate Ingvar's personality.
- ▶ 1:52:43 Ben Gilbert The fact that he wrote this is, well, here it is.
- ▶ 1:54:10 David Rosenthal So, he writes, the feeling of having finished something is an effective sleeping pill.
- ▶ 1:54:50 Ben Gilbert I feel for Ingvar that this is his, like, view on life, because anytime anything awesome happens, I'm, like, immediately on to the next thing and unwilling to acknowledge, like, it doesn't give me happiness that something great happened.
- ▶ 1:55:19 David Rosenthal Like Ingvar, I think is living proof of this.
- ▶ 1:55:43 David Rosenthal You know, he writes, a person who retires feeling that he has done his bit will quickly wither away.
- ▶ 1:55:48 David Rosenthal That is like, no more perfect example of that exists than Ingvar himself.
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