Interviewer: Heather Clancy, editor-at-large, GreenBiz
Guest: Karen Pflug, chief sustainability officer at Ingka Group
Recording from live webcast on April 23, 2024
Close to 700 million people visited Ikea stores last year. Today Ikea is using its footprint — it’s the world’s largest furniture retailer — to encourage those customers to develop sustainable consumption habits. This includes a push for plant-based foods, selling technologies that save water and energy, and new services for taking back, recycling and reusing items people no longer want. In this episode of Climate Pioneers, a new GreenBiz video series featuring innovators and executives working to mitigate the climate crisis, host Heather Clancy will talk with the executive who has led this mission for three years: Karen Pflug, chief sustainability officer at Ingka Group, which operates most of Ikea's stores.
Learn firsthand how Pflug, who has held a range of senior leadership roles in fashion and sportswear brands such as Nike and Reebok, helps customers extend the life of furniture they purchase, experiments with reusable packaging and measures return on investment, both environmental and financial.
The conversation will cover:
- -How Ikea helps consumers embrace “sustainable lifestyles” and how that affects revenue
- -How Pflug involves retail workers and customers
- -Lessons learned about designing for circularity
- -How Ikea is shifting 50 percent of in-store menus to plant-based foods
- -How Pflug interacts with key allies in the C-suite across the organization
- -Her team structure
- -Her typical day, team meeting and board prep techniques