We are committed to diversity and inclusion

At Zalando, we want to empower people to express themselves, from our own employees to our customers and partners. We aim to actively contribute to a world where everyone feels included and valued. That’s why we are dedicated to fostering an inclusive company culture that welcomes different perspectives and connects people with various backgrounds. We are proud that people from more than 140 different countries choose to work at Zalando and assist our 50 million customers across 25 European markets – it is them who have made Zalando the European success story that it is.

Our commitment to diversity and inclusion serves us in many ways. It helps us hire and retain more diverse talent which reflects our broad customer base. It supports the creation of fresh ideas and reduces blindspots so that we can deliver excellent service and products to all of our customers across Europe. It further helps us to engage in a dialogue with our partners and the entire industry, so that we can learn from each other and drive positive change together. That's why we believe in and advocate for diversity and inclusion, openness, and equal opportunities. We reject anything that opposes these values and we must never give space to exclusion, hate and xenophobia.
 
Here are just some of the ways in which we at Zalando are promoting diversity and inclusion, and putting it at the core of everything that we do.

We strive for gender equality

Our holistic company-wide D&I do.BETTER strategy, includes diversity targets for our leadership. We aim for a balanced representation of women and men on our top five management levels, including the Management Board, by the end of 2025. This target is defined as a 40-60% corridor where Zalando strives for women and men to reach a representation between 40 and 60 percent on each level. We transparently report on our progress in our annual Diversity & Inclusion Report and are proud of having achieved an average of 35.6% of top-five leadership level roles occupied by women in 2023. We are on the right path to achieving our target for women in leadership.

We help accelerate the careers of women

Our internal mentoring program promotes the development of women in management positions. We have established measures to ensure that the application and promotion processes are free of biases that favor one specific gender.

We recognize diversity in tech teams as a particularly important challenge. In 2023, women made up 25.9% of the tech workforce at Zalando. For our company, this means that more men are building our tech products, which are primarily used by women. To tackle this imbalance, we aim to increase the share of women in our tech teams to *40-60%. We are investing in dedicated initiatives, such as a Women in Tech Reskilling program and collaborative partnerships with external organisations.

We are defaulting to transparency

March 2024 marked the release date of Zalando’s fourth do.BETTER Diversity & Inclusion Report. It's our intention to provide transparency and insight into the state of diversity and inclusion within the company and the progress we're making by regularly publishing a report.

We care about families

A family-friendly work environment is important to keep our employees happy and healthy. At Zalando, we are constantly working on improving our support for parents. The COVID-19 pandemic has made adhering to regular working hours even more challenging for caregivers. Thus, we have increased flexibility regarding our working hours and developed additional support measures. Zalando grants three fully paid child-sick-days per parent per calendar year. We further offer counseling services with external partners, and personal consulting with our Wellbeing team.

We believe in the power of community

Our employees are drivers of many projects around diversity, equity and inclusion within the company. One example is our annual Pride Month activation campaign, including the temporary pride rainbow redesign of the Zalando logo, organised by Zalando’s LGBTQI+ community and the Diversity Guild. Zalando’s Diversity Guild was formed in 2015 as a grassroots initiative and our first employee-led community of support for members of minority groups at Zalando. We formally rolled out our employee resource group (ERG) program in 2019 to support more communities organised around shared identity or experience at Zalando. ERGs create safe spaces where colleagues can feel like they belong, foster awareness and support, and amplify employee voices to inform leadership about the needs of their communities. We currently have eleven ERGs.

We keep learning from each other

Everyone has unconscious biases and blindspots. To uncover and reduce them, and become more understanding and aware of each other's identity, experience and reality, we offer an unconscious bias training. In this we focus on developing awareness of how our individual experiences shape the ways we think and see the world. Through dedicated learning modules, Zalandos can drill down into the essence of bias and see how it plays out in work scenarios. We work with internal trainers as well as external facilitators and organisations to offer workshops, training  and resources. The courses are offered online on our company training platform, and have become mandatory for all employees since 2023.

We work on eliminating barriers

In January 2020, Zalando joined The Valuable 500, a global group of businesses committed to address disability inclusion. We provide case management support for Zalandos with disabilities and have designed our Disability Inclusion Action Plan, based on disability metrics by the Valuable 500. The Plan lines out four areas of focus: workplace adjustments, leadership enablement, accessibility improvements and allyship. We have invested in accessibility to our office spaces, for example, by installing more automated doors and accessible restrooms at our new offices in Berlin. Leaders can also educate themselves via dedicated resources to ensure that they have the knowledge they need to effectively uphold our commitment to disability inclusion. Looking toward the future, Zalando will continue to challenge itself to improve its diversity, aiming to foster a fashion ecosystem that welcomes everyone.