A boy walks a frozen dirt road in rural Sweden with boxes of matches in his coat pocket. He buys them cheap in bulk in Stockholm and sells them one at a time to his neighbors for a few coins. The matches are beside the point. What he is really doing on those doorsteps is teaching himself how to take the plainest object anyone can name and move it in a way that makes people reach for their money. His name is Ingvar Kamprad, and the habit will become IKEA.

This episode of the MR. HANSoN Podcast traces the rise of the man who built one of the largest retail empires on earth out of ten thousand small refusals to accept waste. From the stone-choked soil of Småland, to founding IKEA at seventeen with his father's gift money, to the accident on a loading dock when a worker pulled the legs off a table to fit it in a car, to the industry boycott t ...