Growing up in the 1940’s Ingvar Kamprad struggled with dyslexia. As a reward for trying hard at school his father gave him a gift of money and he used it to start a small furniture business. One day as he struggled to fit a table into the back of a car his colleague observed, “This table takes up too much space. We should unscrew the legs.” It was a lightbulb moment. Flat-pack furniture was born.
Sixty years on and IKEA is a multi-billion dollar business. Around the world 60 million Billy bookcases grace our homes and every 3 seconds another one rolls off the production line at a factory in Sweden that makes nothing else.
Of course Kamprad is not the first carpenter to take a traditional idea and so revolutionise it that it sweeps the world. Two thousand years ago Jesus took the faith of His fathers and transformed it into a movement that easily translated into every culture and nation, and rapidly spread through the world. Like Kamprad He met with resistance from those who objected to these new-fangled innovations, but also like Kamprad, in the end the beautiful simplicity of His ideas proved irresistible.
