Ingvar Kamprad and Steve Jobs are two people that have set their footmark forever on this planet. Ingvar Kamprad is founder of the great furniture empire, IKEA. Steve Jobs is best known as one of the co-founders of Apple, the most valuable company on earth. Both these business gurus are huge role models of mine and have definitely changed my way of thinking in several ways.
Mr. Kamprad could be any 85-year-old white man with his faded coat, tinted prescription glasses and scuffed shoes; he looks like just another pensioner scraping by on a tight budget. Even though Steve Jobs left us as a 65 year old, together with his famous black mock turtleneck, blue mom jeans and cheap tennis shoes, they both shared a simple way of dressing.…show more content… He was very careful and smart to buy cheap and then sell it for more. He started out with matchboxes, which he bought for about 1.5 cents and sold for five. It then continued with Christmas trees, Christmas magazines and packets of seeds and eventually pens and watches too. According to a brochure, the pens did so well that it became necessary for him to give it a business name. Ingvar Kamprad registered IKEA at an age of 17. It was a graduation present from his father Feodor because Ingvar was a minor and only his father could subscribe for the company. In 1946, IKEA was announced for the first time in the local press and the first flyer was attached in the Farmers' Association Leaf in 1948. In 1953, Kamprad bought a carpentry shop in Älmhult (Sweden), which he converted into a furniture showroom and opened it the same year. Two years later, IKEA began designing its own furniture and ordering them from the furniture industry. The first store was opened in 1958 in Älmhult. Today IKEA is the world's largest furniture retailer and distributed all over the world (Internet). According to a magazine Ingvar is the 11th richest person on the planet, but still he takes EasyJet flights, drives himself around in a 15-year-old Volvo, and has furnished his modest house almost entirely with IKEA items - which he assembled himself. He boasted that he fired his barber of many years' standing after finding another who would cut his
