Latest Profiles by The Cool Hunter - for more checkout www.thecoolhunter.net http://www.thecoolhunter.net Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:36:32 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://www.thecoolhunter.net/images/M_images/joomla_rss.png http://www.thecoolhunter.net Latest Profiles by The Cool Hunter - for more checkout www.thecoolhunter.net http://www.thecoolhunter.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1026&Itemid=39 IT SEEMS INCREDIBLE TODAY, BUT LITTLE OVER A DECADE AGO Porsche was in serious danger of collapse. In 1993, it sold just 14,000 cars, down from 53,000 in 1986, and in 1991 lost around $150 million. Enter Wendelin Wiedeking. An engineer by trade, he came to Porsche in 1992 as head of its production and materials department. He had traveled to Japan and seen how car companies there ran their production lines; Porsche, in comparison, was back in the Middle Ages. Virtually everything was made by hand in-house, which brought the benefits of fine craftsmanship, but the downside of terrible inefficiency and occasional sloppy workmanship. Brashly promising to deliver a 30 percent reduction in production costs, Wiedeking brought in a team of Japanese time and motion experts from Toyota to ruthlessly pull apart the existing system. He benchmarked the entire production process. Then, he cut the number of managers by 35 percent and fired 95 percent of the sales and marketing managers, in his version of an old German proverb, “You sweep the steps from the top down”—meaning effective change permeates the entire organization, starting with the bosses. Next, he went to the suppliers and pointed out their inefficiencies too, resulting in lower prices for Porsche. He may not have made many friends, but his methods were so effective and the results so obvious that the Porsche and Piech families, who still run the company, asked him to take over as CEO in 1993, at age thirty-nine. It was a job, as they say, for somebody looking for a challenge. Wiedeking inherited a creaky, old-school factory and an ancient model range burdened with other people’s mistakes. The company’s heritage was closely tied to one model, the 911, a car thirty years old. Attempts to broaden the range in the hope of increased sales had failed—Porsche customers had refused to recognize any model but the 911 as a true Porsche. Wiedeking’s genius was to recognize that the company did not have to abandon its heritage to move forward. Porsche had, after all, been in the sports car business for half a century, since Ferdinand Porsche built the first model, the 356, in 1948. He cancelled plans to phase out the 911, instead dumping the models planned to succeed it, including a four-seater sedan. While hanging on to the 911’s heritage, he also introduced a new entry-level model, the Boxster, a two-seater drop-top that was instantly recognizable as “Porsche.” Lauded by the motoring press for its sharp handling, it was so popular with buyers that it still has a waiting list. If anything, there was a danger that the newer, cheaper Boxster would poach sales from the more expensive 911, but behind the scenesWiedeking had it all worked out. The Boxster would, in fact, ensure the future success of its stablemate, while also paving the way for a new, more controversial model, the four-wheel-drive Cayenne. It was all about efficiency. When he first planned the Boxster, Wiedeking knew Porsche could not afford to tool up a new factory of its own. So he took the previously unheard-of step of having the Boxster built by somebody else—in this case, a Finnish auto maker—leaving him more resources at the Porsche factory. Then Wiedeking lent parts of the Boxster’s design to the new 911, simplifying... Tue, 29 May 2007 17:36:18 +0100 http://www.thecoolhunter.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=989&Itemid=39 HOW A RANGE OF HOMEMADE MAKEUP BECAME A TRAILBLAZING global brand is the story of two Franks, partners in life and business: Frank Toskan, a fashion photographer/makeup artist and Frank Angelo, a successful hairdresser. Toskan was the makeup guru and Angelo the entrepreneur. The flamboyant Angelo was running a successful chain of hairdressing salons in Toronto when he met Toskan. His first venture was a little movie business for neighborhood children that he ran when he was seven. The Franks met in the early 1970s. Their quest for better qualitymakeup for their fashion shoots sent Toskan into their kitchen at the back of Angelo’s hair salon in the Toronto suburb of Cabbage Town. “Commercial cosmetics weren’t working for me, so I had to develop my own,” he says. Toskan enlisted the help of future brother-in-law and nineteen-year-old chemist Vic Casale and they worked on a tiny range of lipsticks, eye pencils, bases, and powders. Initially, the product was only distributed among friends in the fashion industry, but word soon got out about the dense pigment, the non-oily finish of the foundations, and the color range. The demand inspired Toskan and Angelo to liquidate their property assets and invest the proceeds in Makeup Artist Cosmetics. (http://www.maccosmetics.com) The business was formally established in 1984, with Toskan as creative director and Angelo as marketing director. MAC moved out of the kitchen into a 10,000- foot manufacturing plant that they grew out of within twelve months. From the very beginning, MAC took a very clear position in the marketplace. The buzz about MAC was built at fashion shows, through Madonna video clips, on the cutting edge of the arts. Originally for makeup professionals, the brand became even more desirable because of its real links to the fashion frontline. The brand also stood for diversity, with its extensive color ranges to suit “all sexes, all races, all ages.” Says Toskan: “I have always resented the image of the nineteen-year-old beautiful blonde, white model being shoved down people’s throats.” To prove the point, MAC’s first spokesperson was 6’7” drag queen Ru Paul. “MAC has broken the traditional industry way of selling product,” says Toskan. MAC’s radical approach also included going against the traditional cosmetic retailing strategy of high advertising spend and gift-with-purchase promotions. Toskan and Angelo’s business model relied on a formula of low prices and word of mouth, no advertising, and no gift with purchase promotions. “I always believed in earning your customer, not buying her,” says Toskan. MAC’s first big break was being offered space in a Toronto department store in 1984, albeit a very out-of-the-way counter. MAC continued to retail differently, with its black-clad trained makeup artists as sales assistants who were, for the most part, not working on commission. Without this sales pressure, the MAC people could concentrate on giving service that would keep the customers coming back. Apart from maple syrup, MAC is one of the few Canadian exports that has had success out of its homeland. MAC’s first U.S. sales were through the prestigious New York department store Henri Bendel, where women would wait in line for hours on weekends for the lip pencils. MAC opened its first store in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1991. Growth was exponential and caused serious problems for Toskan and Angelo. “We had created... Wed, 25 Apr 2007 04:21:57 +0100 http://www.thecoolhunter.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=941&Itemid=39 A LITTLE OVER A DECADE AGO, NOKIA (http://www.nokia.com) WAS AN UNKNOWN COMPANY IN A TINY country on the edge of the Arctic Circle. So little was known about it, in fact, that until recently most people assumed it must be Japanese. Today, the Finland-based firm makes three out of every ten mobile phones sold around the world, convincingly trumping electronics giants such as Motorola and Ericsson. Its brand was rated the sixth most valuable by Interbrand in 2005, just behind Microsoft and Coca-Cola. It is Finland’s largest exporter, has inspired a technology boom around the capital, Helsinki, and its shares have created thousands of Finnish millionaires. Mobile phones are so commonplace in Finland today (seven hundred per one thousand people) that teenagers call them kännykkä, or känny, which means “an extension of the hand.” Bold leadership, inspired hiring decisions, good timing, and an element of national character all played a role in Nokia’s success. The company dates back to 1865, when it ran a lumber mill in the southern Finnish town of Nokia. It expanded slowly into rubber, making boots, cables, and phone lines. In the early 1960s, thanks to its telecom connections, it began to dabble in early radio telephones. Sparsely populated Scandinavia was a natural market, and when the region launched a basic cellular network in 1981, Nokia ran a small factory to supply the early phones, such as a ten-kilogram car phone. If that was where the company’s future lay, though, it was far from obvious. Nokia diversified into televisions and computers without much success. By the mid-1980s, the company’s main achievements were as the chief supplier of toilet paper to Ireland and the world’s only manufacturer of studded winter bicycle tires. In 1987, Nokia’s fledgling mobile phone business started losing money. Under the direction of CEO Kari Kairamo, Nokia started looking for a Japanese partner to help it build a consumer electronics brand, but, as negotiations were under way in 1988, Kairamo committed suicide after battling depression. In 1991, the Soviet Union, Finland’s main trading partner, collapsed, and Nokia’s traditional businesses started struggling too. With shareholders complaining, Nokia management considered selling off the mobile phone interests to cut costs. First, though, they turned to a young executive called Jorma Ollila to see if the mobile phone division could be turned around. Ollila, who had joined the company in 1985, was always a bright prospect. Although born and schooled in Finland, at the age of seventeen he gained a scholarship to attend Atlantic College, an idealistic boarding school in Wales designed to bring together future leaders. After graduating, he studied for an MBA at the London School of Economics and worked at Citibank’s London office, where he was given the Nokia account to look after. Within a year of joining Nokia, he was appointed head of finance. In 1990, he was made head of the mobile phone division and was given six months to decide whether to sell up or keep it. After four months, he replied: keep it. He had visited the factory in Salo, about an hour from Helsinki, where he learned the company was struggling to prepare for the new European mobile digital standard, GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications). “The GSM project was in disarray,” Ollila recalled in 2001. “There was a lot of disillusionment... Fri, 09 Mar 2007 17:52:42 +0100 http://www.thecoolhunter.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=853&Itemid=39 FINE ART. CHEAP HOTELS. CONTEMPORARY DESIGN. SUBVERSIVE sexuality. These are just some of the eclectic personal interests Benedikt Taschen has turned into a worldwide publishing empire with annual sales estimated at $100 million.Taschen lives in the Los Angeles hills but was born in Cologne, Germany in 1961. He is one of those lucky people who always knew what he wanted to do, and what he wanted to do turned out to have enormous commercial potential. The key to his success appears to be his ability to make decisions, combined with a selfassured, if unorthodox, working style: he rises at noon and doesn't work long hours, but tries to be as effective as possible when he is in the office.Taschen first dabbled in his chosen profession at age eight, when he set up a booth on the fringes of an art market to sell drawings he had made of vampires, netting a healthy $490. By thirteen, he had a mail-order business trading comic books. "You always come to the question where you have to decide whether to sell or collect,"ť he recalls, I stopped collecting and became a dealer. At eighteen, he opened his own comic book shop in Cologne, helped by funding from his parents, both doctors.Publishing followed: his first effort was a comic book called Sally Forth, whose cover featured a naked blonde surrounded by gnomes with bulging eyeballs. Then, in 1984, he played a hunch, borrowing money from his family to buy up 40,000 remaindered copies of an English-language book on the artist Ren Magritte, selling them for double the price back in Cologne. There was, Taschen had discovered, enormous demand for high-quality art books from the general public the problem was most publishers printed them in small numbers and charged the earth for them.Not Taschen, who entered fine art publishing with a book of Annie Leibovitz photographs, followed by a book on Salvador Dali that he sent to bookstores accompanied by a poster that depicted the artist looking shocked under the words: genius like me for only $6.99? His business methods were straightforward but totally unconventional. Unlike other publishers, he insisted on retaining the rights to all his publications, wherever they were printed and sold. He negotiated large upfront payments to contributors in lieu of the usual ongoing royalties and he refused to allow bookstores to return unsold books (if they ended up in bargain basements, he didn't care). What we always wanted to do was to make the books accessible and available and affordable for everyone who was interested,ť he said.In 1993, now ensconced in a beautiful converted mansion in Cologne, ”Taschen ran an advertisement in the trade magazine Publishers Weekly that showed him fully dressed next to his former wife, Angelika, in the nude, with the words "Luxury for less".ť It caused a scandal in the staid world of books which, of course, was the point. A book on Hitler's documentary-maker, Leni Riefenstahl, caused another stir.Not all of Taschen's books are necessarily cheap or provocative, though: 2004, homage to Muhammad Ali was not only the heaviest book printed in living memory, but it cost $3,000 or $7,500 (depending on the edition), trumping the previous record-holder for price, an enormous monograph on the photographer Helmut Newton that came with its own coffee table for... Tue, 19 Dec 2006 20:22:50 +0100 http://www.thecoolhunter.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=771&Itemid=39 NOT EVERY SUCCESSFUL BUSINESSPERSON IS A NATURAL entrepreneur. Miuccia Prada, the quirky, beyond-cool fashion designer with the most futuristic store in the United States, isn't even sure she's in the right business. "I had many problems for many years doing this work,"ť she said in 1998, "because I wanted to do something more serious."Born into a well-to-do family in Milan, Italy, Prada studied political science, flirted with the Communist Party, and belonged to a theatrical troupe as a mime artist for six years before relatives encouraged her to direct her efforts into the family business, which her paternal grandfather, Mario, had founded in 1913, making such luxuries as walrus-skin bags with ivory fittings for the Italian royal family.The leather goods business was still based around a single shop in Milan when Miuccia eventually took over in 1978. The same year, she met her future husband, Patrizio Bertelli, at a trade fair. Bertelli, the son of a lawyer and teacher, had studied engineering at Bologna University but dropped out to start his own business making leather goods. He first struck a deal with Miuccia to give him the exclusive license to make Prada products, then he wooed her, encouraging her to expand into shoes and fashion, giving the fashion house a new, inspiring edge.The couple married in 1987 and today control the sprawling Prada group, a private company that owns the Prada and Miu Miu labels and has controlling interests in several other brands. Bertelli owns one-third of the business, Miuccia and the Prada family own the rest.Their relationship is famously stormy. "When they say we scream a lot, it's true, Prada said in 2004"”but it has also been enormously productive, melding Prada's creativity with Bertellis business sense. One of Prada's breakthrough products was a bag that was determinedly utilitarian yet perfectly chic, a black nylon backpack that became the 'must-have'ť accessory for fashionistas in the early 1990s. It was the ideal antidote to the excesses of the 1980s, yet its little triangular badge became as sought-after as any other luxury label and was just as expensive.The bag spawned enormous demand for the Prada range of nylon and leather accessories. Bertelli reportedly told boutiques that if they wanted Prada's accessories, they also had to carry Miuccia's minimalist line of womenswear, which he had encouraged her to design. Menswear, the Prada Sport range and the younger label Miu Miu (Miuccia's nickname), followed. Prada expanded in the 1990s, buying up controlling interests in Jil Sander, Helmut Lang, and Church and Co. shoes. The Prada group now has over 250 retail outlets worldwide, including three flagship stores”called epicenter concept stores that reflect its owners growing interests in contemporary architecture, technology and the arts. The company's SoHo store in New York, designed by difficult Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and built in 2001 at a cost of $40 million, came with glass changing room doors that turned opaque at the push of a button, a $1 million cylindrical elevator and clothes displayed in hanging cages not a store in which to browse lightly. In 2003, Prada opened another śepicenterť in Tokyo, designed by Herzog and de Meuron, a six-story glass crystal, crisscrossed with lattice.The Prada website, in contrast, is deliberately minimal, offering a home page with an image of current fashions and nothing else. With... Fri, 29 Sep 2006 23:31:12 +0100 http://www.thecoolhunter.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=772&Itemid=39 Ever since its inception, one of the internet's most commonly used features is the limitless pool of jokes and wacky pictures. Millions of people around the world devote large chunks of time to this phenomenon, particularly college students who can't get enough of dorm room gags, especially if they involve beer, bloopers, and topless girls. In the winter of 2000, connoisseurs of college humor and aspiring business students Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen created a website that would cater to this discerning demographic of 18 to 24-year-olds, giving students a forum for their often tasteless, crass comedy. The pair, friends since the sixth grade in Baltimore where they grew up, had the goal of finding enough online advertisers to pay for their beer (a considerable campus expense) and creating a website fully dedicated to grinding your academic efforts to a halt. There was never a business plan. The greatest thing about starting a business in college, says Abramson, is that there is very little risk.ť There was a $30 a month server fee and that's it.online (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1402206313/qid=1138843914/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/102-3337163-1956116?s=books v=glance n=283155) Tue, 12 Sep 2006 23:33:58 +0100 http://www.thecoolhunter.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=773&Itemid=39 NIKE TOOK SOMETHING EVERYBODY ALREADY HAD FOR FREE, gave it neat-looking packaging, bought celebrity endorsements for it, and sold it for a premium. What they sold, of course, was air. Nike's Air cushioning system was a triumph of technology and marketing, and, assisted by a basketball player named Michael Jordan, Nike grew from car-boot sales to the largest seller of sports shoes in the world by quite a margin.In 1962, Phil Knight, an accounting major and middle-distance runner from the University of Oregon, took a trip to Japan. There, inspired by a term paper he had written about importing sneakers, he struck a deal with a sneaker manufacturer called Onitsuka Tiger (later known as Asics) to become the brand's distributor in thirteen western states, later expanding to national distribution rights. Under the company name Blue Ribbon Sports, Knight originally ordered 200 pairs, paying $3.33 a pair. On his return to the U.S. he teamed up with his running coach, Bill Bowerman, each contributing $500 to the enterprise. They sold the Tiger sneakers for $6.95 a pair from the trunk of Knight's green Plymouth Valiant at athletics meets and from a tiny shop next to the Pink Bucket Tavern in Portland; in 1964, they made $8,000. Knight, who was working part-time as an accountant, hired a full-time salesman named Jeff Johnson, another runner, who would later come up with the name Nike after it came to him in a dream. Nike is the Greek goddess for victory.Meanwhile Bowerman spent his spare time experimenting with homemade shoe designs, obsessing with shaving fractions of seconds off his runners track times. In 1970, he mythically poured rubber onto his wife's waffle iron and created a new lightweight sole that offered athletes unprecedented cushioning and traction. In 1971, Knight and Bowerman took Johnson's idea for thename and called the business Nike. The go-faster stripe that looked like a tick on the side the Swoosh”came from a local design student who they paid just $35 (though she was later rewarded with Nike stock). In 1974, they launched the Waffle Trainer, which went on to become the best-selling training shoe in the United States. Bowerman and Knight had a natural flair for marketing. After the 1972 Olympic marathon trials, they announced that four of the top seven finishers had worn Nike shoes (ignoring the fact that the top three places were filled by runners wearing Adidas, then the world number one). In 1973, Nike persuaded recordholding runner Steve Prefontaine to wear its shoes; then in 1974, with no paid endorsement, Jimmy Connors won Wimbledon and the U.S. Open wearing the Waffle Trainer. In 1978, John McEnroe signed up (paid at one time what was then regarded as a scandalous $100,000 a year) and Nike began its march to become a world-leading brand—in 1980 replacing Adidas as the country's top sneaker company. That was also the year Nike went public, turning several families who had invested $5,000 each in the early days into millionaires.Nike's Air cushioning system first appeared in 1979 in a model called the Tailwind, after a former aerospace engineer called Frank Rudy had approached Blue Ribbon Sports with the idea of including a little air bladder in the heel of a shoe. After making around 1,000 prototypes to get the formula right, he licensed his... Mon, 28 Aug 2006 23:37:28 +0100 http://www.thecoolhunter.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=708&Itemid=39 Once upon a time in the late 1960's, two surfer dudes were living the good life around the legendary surf spot Bells Beach near Torquay in southern Australia. In between surfing sessions, beers, and tins of baked beans, Alan Green and John Law began making board shorts. They wanted to rid their lives of the uncomfortable, impractical surfing shorts available at the time. The business was funded with a $1,900 loan from Green's father. Word of mouth grew about these boardies and their little concern gained momentum. The pair also created sheepskin boots they called Ugg Boots (nice to wear after a surf in freezing conditions) and began selling those. Green and Law got their timing right, arriving in the marketplace just as surfing culture was getting widespread mainstream attention. Following on from the 1959 movie Gidget and films such as The Endless Summer promoted the sun, sand, surf, and sex lifestyle, and a growing army of wannabes wanted to feel a part of this exclusive club, regardless of whether or not they surfed. Equipment and fashion for this market was primitive, so there was plenty of scope for new products and fashion. online (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1402206313/qid=1138843914/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/102-3337163-1956116?s=books v=glance n=283155) Tue, 01 Aug 2006 15:09:42 +0100 http://www.thecoolhunter.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=665&Itemid=39 THE POLITE, GENTEEL WORLD OF LUXURY GOODS HAS BEEN turned on its head by Frenchman Bernard Arnault. The New York Times describes him as a man who has “built an empire out of companies he pried, for the most part, from the resistant grasps of others, one by one.”Born in Roubaix in northern France in 1949, Arnault attended the prestigious École Polytechnique and earned a reputation for being studious rather than social. He was raised by his strict Catholic grandmother and worked in the family property and construction business, including stints selling real estate on the French Riviera and in Florida. At twenty-five he was CEO of a company with one thousand staff members. Arnault was influenced by the American can-do approach to business, a far cry from the more conservative French approach. He is now the richest man in France and among the top-ten richest people in the world, with an estimated fortune of $20 billion. According to Forbes magazine estimates, his net worth will triple between 2003 and 2005. His family now owns 48 percent of Louis Vuitton Möet Hennessy. He presides over a $40.5 billion empire of the world’s most prestigious brands, including Louis Vuitton (the most profitable luxury brand in the world), Christian Dior, Guerlain, Givenchy, and Möet et Chandon, with interests in wine, fashion, retail, jewelry, leather goods, perfume, and beauty products. In 2004 the group had sales of more than $15.1 billion. In 1984, the former property developer entered the luxury goods business when he invested $15 million of family money in buying a bankrupt textile company called Boussac, as part of an $80 million deal with a consortium of investors. The portfolio included the unprofitable Christian Dior brand and a diaper company called Peaudouce. Arnault believed that Dior was worth salvaging. He sold off most of the Boussac companies, unceremoniously culled half of the company’s sixteen-thousand-strong workforce and began building his empire, one brand at a time. Arnault was cashed up, thanks to the sale of the diaper business, which netted $400 million. He set his sights on the French bastion of luxury, Louis Vuitton Möet Hennessy, executing a hostile takeover in 1988 that cemented his reputation as the “wolf in cashmere clothing.” His takeover style involved his holdingcompanies buying up stock and then, with 45 to 60 percent of the company equity, taking over. Then it was on to the next acquisition. When Arnault took over LVMH, the group controlled ten luxury brands; now it owns more than fifty, including Chateau d’Yquem, Celine, Christian Lacroix, Dom Perignon, Bon MarchĂ©, TAG Heuer, Domaine Chandon, Hennessy Cognac, St. Emilion, and Glenmorangie. LVMH is also involved in joint ventures with DeBeers and DFS duty-free stores.Arnault calls his company a “federation” of brands. He has built his luxury goods empire on his two favorite things: creative force and hard-nosed business, principles he calls “the artist’s vision and the logic of worldwide marketing.” Arnault buys the history, tradition, prestige, and recognition of a brand and takes it... Tue, 27 Jun 2006 21:40:41 +0100 http://www.thecoolhunter.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=647&Itemid=39 Attack your competitors with innovation; reward your customers with value. AN ENTREPRENEURIAL STREAK WAS PULSING THROUGH THE veins of Ingvar Kamprad from an early age. At five, he was selling matchboxes door-to-door. By seventeen, dyslexic Kamprad was selling pencils, an enterprise that developed into a mail-order business also selling soap, seeds, and stockings. This venture was so successful that Kamprad registered the company name IKEA: an acronym where I stands for Ingvar, K for Kamprad, E for Elmtaryd (the name of the farm Kamprad grew up on), and A for Agunnaryd (the Swedish village he grew up in). IKEA started in a shed that had been used for storing milk churns. His strategy was to seriously undercut his competitors, and by twenty-three, after serving a carpenter’s apprenticeship, he had turned his attentionsto a furniture business. He had very big plans. Today, IKEA has 225 stores in more than thirty countries, anannual turnover of more than $17 billion, and 90,000 employees. Kamprad is one of the richest men in the world with a personal fortune of $18.5 billion. Kamprad revolutionized furniture retailing by making what was once a luxury more accessible to more consumers. Now, instead of spending many years’ salary to furnish ahome, IKEA customers can deck out their homes with only a few months’ salary. In 1953, the first IKEA showroom opened in Almhult, a railway town in Sweden. The first showroom was a huge success, leavingother Swedish furniture retailers particularly unhappy with Kamprad’s ability to undercut competitors. When the Swedish National Association of Furniture Dealers boycotted him, Kamprad was forced to look outside the country for suppliers and to design pieces in-house. Around the same time, Kamprad stumbled on the idea of flatpacking furniture when a coworker took the legs off a table for easier transport. Bingo. Because of the boycott, IKEA began manufacturing in Poland and, to save on shipping and storage costs, designed pieces that could be flat-packed for delivery back to Sweden. Instead of assembling the furniture once it arrived,Kamprad sold it from the warehouse straight to customers, who could easily take the flat packs home in their cars and assemble it themselves. The concept for what is now the world’s largest furniture retailer was born.Other IKEA stores appeared throughout Sweden with the flagship store in Stockholm opening in 1965. Other megastores followed in Norway, Denmark, Germany, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States. The company, where titles and suits and ties are rare, remains privately owned through a web of private trusts and charitable foundations. Profits have never been revealed, but Swedish analysts estimatethat IKEA’s profits are around 6 to 7 percent of total sales. The company ethos encourages its more than 90,000 staff to be known as co-workers, and all must follow Kamprad’s nine commandments that center on themes of enthusiasm, humbleness, questioning the status quo, responsibility, self-analysis, simplicity, and thrift. (For more on Kamprad’s doctrine, read his 1976 The Testament of a Furniture Dealer— the retailer’s answer to Chairman Mao’s... Fri, 09 Jun 2006 13:25:09 +0100