Ingvar Kamprad is proud of his reputation as a pennypincher. Ever since he founded Ikea in Sweden in 1943, he devotes time to fi nding ways to save on costs to make his furniture cheaper for millions of Ikea customers. Does cheap mean ugly? Certainly not, at least according to the 12 in-house and 80 freelance designers who produce the range of furnishings, many of them sold disassembled, that can be found in homes around the world, from Spitzbergen in the north to Wellington in the south, and most places in-between.

How does this behemoth manage to bring this off, when most furniture through the ages and to this very day has been manufactured close to where it is sold? The answer is that delivering bulky assembled furniture from manufacturer to dealer and then from dealer to buyer entails transport and handling costs that considerably raise the price of the good that is charged the consumer. Ikea cut this large incremental cost by designing and manufacturing furniture that can be handily packaged, and is so contrived as to enable the purchaser of the furniture to transport it to her home in her car – and then supervise operations as her muscled friends assemble it.

Kamprad’s stroke of genius consisted of the discovery that the furniture world was fl at, and that therefore all Ikea’s creations needed to fi t in fl at cardboard boxes. That was in 1955. By saving on labour costs for assembly, Ikea keeps its prices low, which in turn provides more people the affordability to purchase it. And, in a second turn, it enables Kamprad to proclaim himself on a compassionate mission. “Our idea,” he says of Ikea, “is to serve everybody, including people with little money.”