As 2025 comes to a close, we wanted to share our thoughts on the journey ahead: how we will continue to drive significant value for our customers and partners and seize the exciting opportunities that will set Zalando up for future success.

Our story started 17 years ago with an obsession to serve the fast-changing needs of customers and partners and to provide them with a best-in-class experience. From selling the first pair of flip flops out of an apartment in Berlin, Zalando has always played to win. On this journey, we have seen pivotal changes: a shift to online then mobile, a platform shift, and a COVID-induced shift. Every time, we drove these changes with a growth mindset. Each time we grew stronger, and each time we led our industry.

This helped us to transform from a small startup into one of Europe’s digital champions and a beloved consumer brand, built by brilliant colleagues from more than 140 nations. Today, we connect more than 60 million customers with more than 7,000 fashion and lifestyle brands across 29 markets, constantly delivering technology-driven innovation and building one of the continent’s most advanced logistics networks. 

We’re all in to win

We are witnessing another pivotal change in our industry, potentially the most impactful to date. Artificial intelligence, geopolitical dynamics, cultural changes and intense global competition are rapidly rewriting how European consumers shop, how fashion and lifestyle brands build their businesses and how companies across industries operate. Customer expectations are rising fast. Business models are being reinvented. Entire industries are being reshaped, creating clear winners and losers.

This is a big moment for the whole industry and a massive opportunity for Zalando. The future will belong to companies that think big and act fast to capture new opportunities and shape the industry. This is what Zalando is all about. 2026 will be one of the most defining years in our history, and we are all in to win.

Thanks to the work of the great teams across Zalando, our strategy to build the leading pan-European ecosystem for fashion and lifestyle ecommerce, to bring Zalando back to double-digit growth and to deliver higher profitability, has begun to bear fruit. Our successful teaming up with ABOUT YOU expands our impact and accelerates our progress.

As we look ahead, our ambition and our potential to elevate our impact for customers and partners, to accelerate our growth as a business and to create long-term value are bigger than ever before. While we have made significant progress, we want to take another big step forward in 2026 by investing in the tremendous opportunities that lie ahead of us.

Going forward, we will serve our customers and partners even better with innovative products and services they love, move faster on improvements and innovations, operate with a true startup mentality and relentlessly execute our ecosystem strategy. Last year we saw how fast we can move when everyone pulls together. For example, our new discovery feed and our revamped loyalty program Zalando Plus were designed, implemented and brought to market in a matter of months. This is the speed and focus we need everywhere within Zalando. This is a race, and we are all in to win it.

Building a powerful flywheel to drive impact at scale

Our ambition to bring Zalando back to double-digit growth is based on the fact that greater scale allows us to create more impact for customers, partners, our people, investors and the planet through our expanding ecosystem.

But to reach this level of growth, we need to generate more cash from the business and invest it in the areas that create the strongest benefits for customers and partners. This will create a flywheel effect, where different parts of our business propel each other with success in one area driving success in others. Let us explain what this means going forward.

In B2C, we will invest to make our platform more attractive to partners by helping them earn more profit through simpler, more efficient operations on the Zalando side, and by providing better tools, insights, and brand presentation across Europe. This, in turn, will allow partners to invest more into our platform, and as the platform becomes more attractive, more brands will join, helping us to grow the selection in quality and quantity we offer across all our 29 markets. A bigger, better selection, combined with stronger curation, personalisation and inspiration, makes Zalando more attractive to customers. This increases our ability to generate cash, which we then reinvest again to make the platform even better for partners and customers. 

The platform flywheel also powers our B2B business. The more brands are active on our platform, the more likely they are to adopt our ZEOS operating system for fashion and lifestyle e-commerce to unlock profitable growth opportunities on and off Zalando. Once they use our logistics services and software tools, it improves the experience for customers, and elevates their operational efficiency. And as ZEOS grows, we can invest more in infrastructure and technology, which again benefits all customers and partners. Again, with each cycle, the flywheel spins faster.

These flywheel effects are like riding a bike. When you first start pedalling, it can feel heavy and slow. But after a few strong pushes, the wheels spin faster, the ride feels smoother, and it becomes easier to build momentum and ultimately win the race. Our investments in Artificial Intelligence and data will help to supercharge our flywheel, by making our products and services better and allowing us to lead the industry in the age of agentic commerce.

Driving efficiencies to boldly invest into the future

To boldly invest into the future and unlock our flywheels of growth, we must transform our operational setup. We must turn our unmatched scale in European fashion, our deep technological understanding, and our relentless drive for efficiency into a sustainable competitive advantage. This advantage will manifest in great customer experiences, best-in-class partner services, and significant value creation for Zalando. But this outcome will not simply be given to us. We must earn it by making Zalando better every single day, through hard work, continuous improvement, and tough, but necessary decisions. This is what it takes to win.

To succeed on this journey, we will rely more than ever before on a culture of entrepreneurship, high performance, and operational excellence. It’s a culture obsessed with impact and fueled by speed. We must embrace the incredible opportunities that automation and AI hold for redefining the way we work, innovate, and operate as a business. This is not a choice; it is an obligation. No customer and no partner is willing to pay extra for a lack of efficiency.

This transformation requires a fundamental shift in mindset. Our accelerating transition towards a platform business in B2C as well as our ambition to provide a best-in-class service offering in B2B demand a leaner, fit-for-purpose setup. We need the opportunity-grabbing, fast decision-making mindset of a 'small, big company,' which requires streamlined leadership layers and highly efficient mechanisms. These transformative changes will be designed, led, and implemented by our Business Unit leaders, and they will unfold across our teams following the timeline that is right for them. Change has always been part of our journey, and it will remain the key to our future success.

Let’s build the future together

Creating the right conditions and setup to move faster and drive more growth will be absolutely worth it. It will make Zalando a company that shapes the future, a European player that operates at a truly world-class level and becomes the global benchmark for customer engagement and loyalty. Very few companies in Europe have this opportunity, but we do.

In a world where Europe, the United States and China are racing for relevance, now supercharged by AI, it matters more than ever to build and scale companies with European roots that create value in and for Europe. Competing globally means measuring ourselves against the very best and setting the highest bar for innovation and execution. Over the past 17 years, we have proven again and again that we have the culture, the conviction and the team to win this global competition if we dare to go all in.

Last but not least, this is an opportunity to build something unique and meaningful together, demonstrating the magic that happens when a diverse group of people from more than 140 nations work as one team. There is so much more to come for Zalando. We are building a unique company that shapes an entire industry and, one day, makes us say: I was part of that.

Thank you for everything you have contributed this year. Thank you for your passion, your talent and your drive. We will have the opportunity to discuss our plans for 2026 in more detail together at our end-of-year All Hands next week. Let’s build the next chapter of Zalando together!

Robert and David