Our Private Labels

As a multi-brand fashion company, we have been developing our in-house brands in the heart of Berlin since 2010. Our six Private Label brands, all developed completely in-house from design to overseeing production, focus on fashionable styles and the essentials most sought after by our customers, including shoes, clothing and accessories for women, men, kids and genderless categories. With our Private Labels Anna Field, Friboo, Even&Odd, Pier One, Yourturn and ZIGN, we serve the diversity of our customers: from streetwear in Yourturn to elevated design in ZIGN Studio. In addition to serving the diversity of our customers, we want to shape the fashion industry to become more inclusive through innovations, use more sustainable practices and share our learnings with partner brands.

Incubator of new ideas around inclusivity and more sustainable practices

Our Private Labels are our in-house incubator of new ideas. While each Private Label brand has a focus consumer group in mind, all share the ambition to be inclusive by design and to leverage more sustainable practices from circular design to the use of innovative materials. Our six labels therefore serve as our innovative lab where we can test new approaches that can contribute to driving positive change in the fashion industry, especially in the areas of diversity and inclusion, circularity and more sustainable practices. We actively share and discuss our learnings and best practices with external and partner brands to support innovation more widely. Three examples of our Private Labels’ innovation in these areas are: our Adaptive Fashion collections, our gender-neutral assortment and our ZIGN Studio collection.

Adaptive Fashion: style and comfort for disabled customers

A huge step forward in terms of inclusivity was the launch of our first Adaptive Fashion collection in October 2022 across five of our Private Label brands: ZIGN, Pier One, Anna Field, Yourturn and Even&Odd. This collection was inspired by our desire to solve a significant customer problem: according to the World Health Organization, more than 130 million people live with disabilities in the European region, yet the fashion market still largely does not cater to their needs. The collection was designed to address this challenge and to provide fashionable, comfortable and accessible styles to customers living with permanent and temporary impairments, such as limited mobility and limited dexterity as well as sensory sensitivity.

To date, all Private Label brands include adaptive styles suitable for disabled people. Since the beginning and still now, our Private Labels’ designers and developers learn through focus groups and wearer trials so that we can learn from the feedback disabled people and carers provide. Ongoing collaboration with and insights from the disabled community inform the expansion of our adaptive assortment into different categories including Kids shoes and fashion and Sports in 2024.

We are also excited to share the invaluable learnings we have gained from working with the disabled community with our brand partners to collaborate on adaptive solutions to better serve the community. A first example is our collaboration with BOSS, during which our Private Labels teams shared technical insights and learnings in Adaptive Fashion to support the brand partner’s design of six women’s and six men's Adaptive Footwear styles, launched in 2024.

Gender-neutral assortment: designing genderless styles with avatars for different sizes

As far as gender-neutral collections, the biggest challenge is to design for all body types, especially if you want to design something more fitted for diverse body types and gender identities. Many people still associate gender-neutral with an oversized or even shapeless style, but that’s simply not true. So when designing sizing patterns for genderless collections, we worked with dedicated focus groups of around 30 people to include individuals of all sizes and gender identities in the fit process. Based on these fittings we created digital avatars that represent various body types that our designers and suppliers can use whenever we design something new for the genderless assortment with fashionability always top of mind. Our Private Label Yourturn is the dedicated Private Label for our genderless assortment and has a strong fashion appeal. Fashion-forward styles with no fixed gender expression in mind, Yourturn is among the top three brands in genderless units sold on Zalando.

ZIGN Studio: material innovation and circular design

With ZIGN Zalando has the first Private Label fully dedicated to more sustainable practices since 2020. In September 2023, we launched ZIGN Studio, an elevated collection that adopted an atelier approach and used material innovations. The ZIGN Studio collection played into the Private Labels’ collective ambition to offer exceptional value and quality to customers while pushing innovation forward. A large part of the collection was designed according to the circular.fashion’s Circular Design Criteria and used a mono-material approach, whereby garments are made from a minimum of 95% of a single material. You can find out more on the ZIGN Studio collection here.

Private Labels’ supply chain: focusing on transparency

For our Private Labels, we collaborate with suppliers with years of expertise in their respective areas. In order to produce for Zalando, the sourcing partners must agree to our Code of Conduct, which sets the standards that we expect our business partners and their subcontractors to comply with. This includes topics such as minimum wage, freedom of association and the absence of forced labour, child labour and discrimination. We progressively disclose the list of suppliers for our Private Labels including their factories. They can be found here.