Inclusive content: creating a sense of belonging through storytelling

Zalando has committed to reflecting and celebrating diversity throughout all visuals, language, and narratives in the customer experience and communications by 2025. Caleb Spahr, D&I Project Manager, talks about the collaborative efforts taken in 2023 to ensure that Zalando’s around 50 million diverse customers are authentically represented through inclusive storytelling.

Caleb, what’s your role at Zalando?

I’m a D&I Project Manager. I help make Zalando’s commitment for representative content a reality. I facilitate collaboration and implementation across our Diversity and Inclusion working groups through workshops, feedback or learning sessions. I’m deeply involved in creating our policies and work with different content creators to review content and ensure it’s inclusive and welcoming for everybody. I also collaborate with our Partner Brands to encourage and support our partners to do the same.

What inspires you personally to work in D&I?

I worked in Fashion PR and Styling for almost a decade before I made the switch to D&I. Throughout those years, I witnessed the exploitation and marginalization of certain groups by the fashion industry– especially women, queer folk and people of color who’ve contributed so much to the creativity and innovation of the industry. Having experienced and seen this happen intentionally and unintentionally, I made it my prerogative to help dismantle these structures by helping those willing to embark on the learning journey and by creating policies and processes that ensure inclusivity and diversity.

What D&I challenges are you and your team solving at the moment?

I work with a team at ZStudios, Zalando’s in-house content production unit. We work to ensure that Zalando’s content, including images and language used in creative campaigns, makes all of our diverse customers feel respected, included, and celebrated. We talk to our customers and experts in the industry to create and update guidelines that put inclusion at the heart of our creative processes. The key question we solve is: how can we change the ways we produce content to create a more inclusive experience for underrepresented groups?

What accomplishments are you and your team most proud of?

Our first accomplishment of 2023 was publishing the D&I Manifesto for Content Solutions, Zalando’s in-house content agency. It defines the tone of voice according to our D&I principle, #InclusiveByDesign, for all creative projects by Zalando and our partners.  

In collaboration with multiple teams involved in content creation at Zalando, we published the first Inclusion Guidelines: Visual Content & Post-Production Guidelines. These guidelines enable photographers, videographers and retouchers to create more diverse and authentic representation, especially of underrepresented groups, which includes setting up the lighting, color calibration, grading and post-production of images and videos.

Also, contributors from Art Direction and Casting created the Compliance Standard for External Talent which aims to create a safer space¹ that protects everyone and provides guidance on how we expect everyone to interact with one another. This material supplements Zalando’s Code of Conduct and is included in our freelance contracts and service agreements.

Finally, we gathered insights from external experts and started dialogues with respective communities to update our guidelines for Modest Wear and Disability Inclusion. We’re excited about our ongoing collaborations with Keely Cat-Wells and her team at Making Space Media to update and centralize our guidance on Disability Inclusion and Adaptive Fashion. For Modest Fashion guidelines, we’re collaborating with Deborah Latouche of Studio Latouche to look at how we can diversify our representation of customers who dress modestly.

¹ A safer space is a supportive, non-threatening environment where all participants can feel comfortable expressing themselves and sharing experiences without fear of discrimination or reprisal. We use the word “safer” to acknowledge that safety is relative - after all, we don’t all feel safe under the same conditions.

What are the key challenges in creating universal guidelines for representing different cultural identities?

Through a series of workshops with our creatives (from stylists to Art Directors to retouchers), we asked ourselves how we can change the ways we produce content to create a more inclusive experience for underrepresented groups.

We established four principles to guide our work. Firstly, we make everyone feel comfortable and confident in front of and behind the camera so that our content reflects that. Secondly, we represent every customer group throughout the entire year, instead of thinking in terms of seasonal campaigns for certain groups. Third, we tell authentic stories that amplify the voices of the identities and groups they represent. And fourth, our content reflects the reality of our customers’ experiences to match their expectations as accurately as possible.  

Do you involve the different communities in the creation of guidelines and solutions?

We do. When coming together to create styling guidelines for specific product categories, we realized two things: our current guidelines for modest clothing and adaptive wear were extensive and in-depth but scattered across the business and targeting different audiences. Also, we wanted more first-hand experience and knowledge from people who are part of these communities. Therefore, our goal quickly became to bring together these best practices in one place and to create a single source of information by involving the groups we aimed to serve.

What are your hopes and dreams for D&I at Zalando and for the wider world?

I hope the industry can look to Zalando as a place for authentic and genuine storytelling. From our product display pages featuring women wearing hijabs to campaigns that celebrate queer people and relationships all year round, to our partner’s content featuring people of different sizes, abilities and colors. We want our customer journey to evolve and feature the diverse communities of Europe. We aim for this representation to feel natural and genuine, not like a checklist or a to-do list.