David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

hadn’t yet been assembled, shipped it
cheaply in flat boxes, and undersold all
his competitors.
In the mid-1950s, however, Kamprad
ran into trouble. Swedish furniture
manufacturers launched a boycott of
IKEA. They were angry at his low
prices, and they stopped filling his
orders. IKEA faced ruin. Desperate for a
solution, Kamprad looked south and
realized just across the Baltic Sea from
Sweden was Poland, a country with
much cheaper labor and plenty of wood.
That’s Kamprad’s openness: few
companies were outsourcing like that in
the early 1960s. Then Kamprad focused
his attention on making the Polish