Ingvar Kampard Essay - 1,711 words

Ingvar Kampard Ingvar Kampard, founder of IKEA (International Furniture Company with current annual 12 billion USD overturn of sales) and one of the wealthiest men on earth, is a classical example of Swedish businessmen. He is a world known innovator and creator of numerous ideas in designing and distributing of furniture. Personal influence of Kampard on whole the structure of IKEA Empire resulted in huge success of its performance at the market. Besides, IKEA has never been corporate property; it is controlled by Kampard family and expands to new markets at the expense of self-financing and brilliant strategies of its architect. Biographers of Ingvar Kampard suppose that a knack for doing commerce was inherited by him from his grandparents. Future millionaire was born on the 30th of March, 1926, in a little Swedish city Piatteruid.


The family was, actually, of German origin, they were related to Paul von Hindenburg. In the 80s of XIX century the Kampards moved from Sudeten Germany to Smalandia province of Southern Sweden in order to find better life. Ingvars grandfather organized a little enterprise, but in 1897 it was on the verge of bankruptcy and, being not able to pay the bills, old Kampard committed suicide. But his wife, Ingvars beloved grandmother, who had been left with three children on her arms, managed to recover the business and went on making a living with commerce and farming. A woman with strong will and mind, grandmother had a great influence with Ingvar, because she made him learn how to overcome tough circumstances with the power of strength of character, will and hard work. Years of the early childhood of Ingvar were spent on a farm called Elmtaryd, located next to the small village of Agunnaryd.


Residents of Smalandia province are known as extremely hardworking, energetic and smart, but also they are famous with their incredible greediness and abilities to do good economy in everything. So, commercial talents and entrepreneur potentialities of the young boy have been forming and developing on very proper pragmatic backgrounds. When Ingvar was hardly 5, he gained his first experience in business. He realized that he could sell a pack of 100 boxes of matches, which his uncle brought from Stockholms market, box by box, by good price with a little profit for himself, which could be reinvested later on. In primary school he used to buy some amounts of matchboxes, pencils or other stationary items by wholesale price and resell them to his class mates three or five times more expensive. It is remarkable, that his own grandma was among his first and the most active customers.


After her death dozens and dozens of never-used pens, pencils, erasers, pencil sharpeners and matchboxes were found packed in her suitcases. In teenage times Ingvar continued and diversified his commercial activities. He did not spend the money he had earned for buying ice-cream or saving for a bicycle, he tried to collect his own capital and invest it into buying more and more of different and profitable goods. He expanded his business into selling post-cards and Christmas tree decorations, seeds, ball-point pens and stationary, watches, wallets, tights and socks. He enjoyed fishing quite a lot and used to sell the fish he could catch. At the age of 15 Ingvar received some considerable amount of money from his father as a reward for his success in the school.


Having joint his own collected financial recourses with fathers money, a young man established his own company. For about two years Ingvars small firm has been doing commerce, selling different goods to retail customers in Southern Sweden. In order to develop his business, Ingvar used to work on creating of different small catalogues of his goods in order to offer placing orders by post. Those were the first steps towards the rise of Kampards career, his first attempts to create own marketing strategies and experience them working successfully for own profits. Ingvars business has been growing and developing, and in 1943 young Kampard had to make official registration of his company. A new enterprise received the name IKEA, which was formed as an acronym of Kampards initials and names of the farm and the village where he had been growing up (Ingvar Kampard Elmtaryd Agunnaryd).


The company went on growing and soon Ingvar already could not visit every customer individually, so he used to hire assistants and a little milk van to deliver the goods to his customers. At the end of 40s, when Europe was recovering after the II World War and restoring dwelling facilities, Kampard got a chance to buy a small furniture factory from Poland and established first IKEA furniture product line. He started producing cheap furniture for people with middle level of income, together with placing orders at the other furniture factories. Not expensive, but reliable and good-quality furniture of Kampard had huge demand, so the strategy of serving for wide public has been totally paid off. During the decade of 50s IKEA business concept has been forming. Ingvar Kampard was very successful with his abilities to fight with problems and to transform routine difficulties into advantages for his company.


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Essay Tags: furniture, ikea, sweden, swedish, customer

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