I believe something that makes people uncomfortable.
Moving IKEA just 1% toward greener production probably creates more environmental impact than launching and sustaining 1,000 small 100% ecological brands.
The math is simple. IKEA reaches hundreds of millions of customers each year and generates over $50 billion in sales [1]. Their supply chain spans continents. A one-percent shift in their procurement affects more material, more carbon, and more human behavior than a thousand startups combined.
But this idea bothers people. It should bother you too.
Why Scale Makes Us Uncomfortable
We want to believe purity matters more than reach. That working with the already-good companies is more ethical than engaging with the problematic giants.
Helping a small business that shares your values feels clean. You feel aligned. You can tell yourself you’re on the right side.
Working with a massive corporation that still has questionable practices feels like compromise — like selling out, like choosing money over mission.
But here’s what experience keeps teaching me: impact doesn’t care about your comfort level.
The IKEA Reality Check
Let’s look at the numbers that shifted how I think about this.
IKEA reduced its value-chain climate footprint by 24.3% between 2016 and 2023, while revenue grew 30.9% [2]. During that same period, it cut absolute emissions 22% [3]. In 2023, its total climate footprint stood at 24.1 million tonnes CO₂ equivalent — 12% lower than the previous year [4].
In that same year, IKEA stores welcomed 860 million visitors [5].
Now imagine those 1,000 small ecological brands again. Even if each served 10,000 customers annually (a generous estimate), they’d collectively reach 10 million people. IKEA reaches 86 times that number.
The small brands might be 100% ecological. IKEA might only improve by 1%. But 1% of 860 million is 8.6 million people affected — nearly the entire reach of all those small brands combined.
And IKEA isn’t stopping at 1%. It’s targeting a 70% reduction in product-use climate footprint by 2030, having already achieved 52% by 2023 [6].
Why Smart People Miss This
It’s called system blindness — focusing on what feels right instead of what changes the system.
Research shows that just 100 companies are linked to 71% of global industrial emissions [7]. Meanwhile, there are over 33 million small businesses in the U.S. [8], each with a fraction of that footprint.
If the goal is to reduce global emissions, where should our energy go?
The uncomfortable answer: the big polluters. Because even small improvements in these giants produce outsized impact compared to perfecting smaller ones.
A study of 6,529 global corporations found that environmental impact scales with company size according to a power law — larger companies’ emissions grow more slowly than their size, meaning each incremental improvement matters more [9].
The Revolution vs. Evolution Question
People often ask why I don’t just work with disruptors. Why engage with the giants at all?
Because both matter.
Disruptors show what’s possible — they create innovations that giants eventually scale. But a disruptor reaching 50,000 people still moves fewer needles than a corporation adopting a decent solution that reaches 50 million.
This isn’t revolution versus evolution. It’s both — disruption to spark change, scale to spread it.
What This Means for You
If you’re working on meaningful change, you face a choice.
You can work with organizations that already align with your values — the clean path. Or with organizations that have massive reach but questionable practices — the uncomfortable path.
The first gives moral clarity. The second gives mathematical impact.
Both are valid. But if your goal is maximum impact, you have to do the math.
A 1% improvement in a system that touches a billion people changes more than a 100% improvement in one that touches a million.
The Practical Reality
I’ll admit: I choose to work with large organizations partly because they can pay for solutions. Smaller ones often have the will but not the resources.
That doesn’t make the impact logic wrong — it makes it real.
You can believe in meaningful change and still need to make a living. Sustainability has to include the person doing the sustaining.
Where to Start
If you’re inside a large organization and want to create that 1% shift, start small.
Track where your own time gets wasted for one week. Where are you spending energy on things that don’t match the scale of your organization?
Then test a fix — a small pilot with clear metrics. Make saying “no” harder than saying “yes.”
You’re not starting a revolution. You’re tuning a system.
You don’t need to move the whole organization 100%. You just need to move it 1%.
