Zalando extends offering for and from underrepresented communities

• Zalando has onboarded over 60 Black-owned brands since 2020
• First multi-brand platform in Europe to offer an extensive assortment for disabled customers
• Zalando continues to invest strongly in supporting women, both in tech careers and in leadership roles

BERLIN, 7 NOVEMBER, 2022 // Zalando publishes its third annual diversity and inclusion (D&I) report today. It tracks progress¹ on twelve concrete commitments within the four pillars of Zalando’s D&I strategy do.BETTER: talents, leaders, customers and partners. The report underlines Zalando's commitment of being the Starting Point for Fashion that is welcoming to everyone. Over the past year, Zalando increased the amount of Black-owned brands and launched an extensive Adaptive Fashion assortment. Moreover, the company increased its share of women in leadership (+2.3pp to 37.5%) and within tech roles (+3.6pp to 24.8%) and progressed on several other commitments.

Amplifying the voices of underrepresented communities

Zalando has onboarded a total of 63 Black-owned brands across beauty, jewelry, and fashion. The range includes both established brands like Karl Kani ((Los Angeles, USA) and local brands from around the world like Aaron Wallace (London, United Kingdom) and Thebe Magugu (Johannesburg, South Africa). By building up long-term relationships with brands that serve or stem from underrepresented groups, Zalando wants to better understand the specific customers’ needs and brand goals. This does not only apply to Black-owned brands, but also to categories like modest wear² or genderless fashion.

Emphasizing ease of dressing

For the first time, Zalando designed an Adaptive Fashion collection for disabled customers³ (e.g. customers with limited dexterity, mobility or sensory sensitivity). As part of Zalando’s commitment to offer an inclusive assortment across price, size and style, collections within five of its private labels now cater to these needs (Zign, Pier One, Anna Field, Yourturn and Even&Odd). Furthermore, Zalando also offers a collection by Tommy Hilfiger Adaptive and has added adaptive shoes by Nike to its assortment. Read more about it here.

Zalando will continue efforts on this path next year, as it will be a partner of the Special Olympics World Games that take place in 2023 in Berlin.

Supporting women to advance their career in tech and in leadership

Today, women at Zalando make up 24.8% of roles across Zalando technical job families. While the company sees a strong Year-on-Year growth (vs. 21.2% in 2021), the ambitious target window of 40-60%⁴ by 2023 will be difficult to achieve, especially since global macroeconomic conditions lead to a slowed pace of hiring overall. Nevertheless, Zalando has increased its efforts by combining hiring process improvements, like guaranteed gender representation on interview panels, with strategic initiatives to attract talents from underrepresented communities in tech:

• Zalando set up a Women In Tech Reskilling Program in collaboration with StartSteps. This ongoing software engineering pilot is enabling employees who identify as women to get to know, grow and transition into tech roles at Zalando.
• Zalando partnered with Girls Talk London to host the very first Black Girls in Tech conference in Berlin. This conference specifically tapped into BPOC (Black and People Of Color) tech talent.
• Zalando plans to continue to build on the success of these first editions in the upcoming years.

Zalando is not only aiming to turn its tech community more gender-equitable, it’s also looking to widen gender representation in its overall leadership teams. With an average of 37.5% of top-five leadership level roles occupied by women against a target of 40-60% by the end of 2023, Zalando is steadily closing in on its commitment. Continuous progress (vs. 35.2% in 2021) was made possible by implementing the aforementioned hiring process improvements and by setting up concrete initiatives like Grow@Zalando, an internal support for career development.

The full 2022 do.BETTER report and a comprehensive D&I Report Memo can be found here.

¹ Yearly progress is tracked from 1 September 2021 to 31 August 2022.

² Modest wear is designed for people who want their clothes to align with religious or personal preferences.

³ Zalando intentionally chose to use "disability-first" language when referring to the disabled community, based on collaboration with disability-led consultancy All is for All and extensive customer research. We acknowledge that "people-first" language (such as “people with disabilities”) is also commonly used.

⁴ By setting a corridor for this target Zalando aims to achieve a balanced representation of both women and men in each of the five leadership levels, hence a share of 40-60% for both genders.