IKEA's unstoppable success is testament to the attitude of founder Ingvar Kamprad, a man who never spent money on things his customers couldn't afford, says Kieran Long.

Ingvar Kamprad's death at the age of 91 is the end of an epoch for design. In his 75-year career, the IKEA founder was responsible for putting modern design into more homes than anyone in history. In doing so, he invented contemporary living.
IKEA's products are today so ubiquitous we hardly notice them. In the future, wherever in the world people make period dramas about the late 20th and early 21st century, the characters will live surrounded by Billy bookcases, Lack tables and Expedit shelves. IKEA is simply a design brand that has universal reach.
Kamprad began his mail-order business in his garden in the south of Sweden in 1943, built his first store in Älmhult in 1958 and then made IKEA into one of the biggest consumer companies in history. Today it employs over 150,000 people, and has over 300 shops in 49 countries, and revenue of tens of billions of dollars annually. IKEA is the lens through which the world sees Sweden
We should put what he achieved in business in perspective. The Swede was not merely successful in a middling James Dyson or Richard Branson kind of way. He was successful at the scale of Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos. He was a business titan, a unicorn hundreds of times over. He is a different generation from the Silicon Valley mavens, but some of his maxims are worthy of its most hawki...