Zalando’s strategy in action: Our mission on inspiration and entertainment
Zalando’s strategy in action: Our mission on inspiration and entertainment
How Zalando is creating new experiences to move beyond transactional relationships with its customers
How Zalando is creating new experiences to move beyond transactional relationships with its customers
In March this year, we launched our updated strategy to build the leading pan-European fashion and lifestyle e-commerce ecosystem around two growth vectors: Business-to-Consumer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B). As part of the B2C vector, we want to differentiate ourselves through quality, enhancing our role in customers’ lifestyle journeys and offering personalised inspiration and entertainment.
When looking at the fashion industry, there is a clearly visible shift in customer expectations, particularly among the younger demographic. We know that 70% of GenZ customers are making a purchase decision while looking for inspiration and 72% of this inspiration happens online. These younger customers have been growing up with the convenience of e-commerce. As a result, for them, inspiration and entertainment have emerged as key differentiators as great convenience is seen as given.
Over the past months, Zalando has developed different pilots and experiences to entertain and engage with customers in an inspiring environment. One example of this is the launch of Zalando Trend Spotter that offers customers weekly inspiration on what’s trending in Europe’s fashion capitals. After the initial launch in six markets, Trend Spotter has been recently rolled out to all markets with four additional cities at the same time we internationalised the Zalando Assistant, powered by Generative AI, to all markets. Another development was the integration of Gen AI into our content production, to create background images for product photos on Zalando in addition to classic photo shoots, making these images more engaging and inspiring for our customers. And all of this is wrapped with a new refreshed brand image that was launched with our Autumn/Winter Campaign, “What do I wear?”
Besides these more prominent projects however, we have also launched several, more local pilots to better understand how customers engage with Zalando and what they enjoy most.
Live Shows & Zalando’s Live Hub
We know that interest in live shopping in Europe is high with 70% of Europeans being open to trying out live shopping, according to Cross Border Commerce Europe. For younger generations such as Millennials and GenZ the interest is even higher.
Therefore, we have been testing various live shopping formats in the Zalando app in Germany, Austria and Switzerland since autumn 2021. Since mid 2024, we are offering regular beauty live shows where customers can learn e.g. about make up trends as well as finding the right products for their skin. These are produced and published next to our regular live shows in different propositions, e.g. supporting customers in finding the right running shoe.
To make it easier for customers to find out when the next live show happens or rewatch a previous one, we have launched our Live Hub on Zalando in which customers can find out what’s on next, see related products to the most recent show or rewatch a show they have missed. The live hub as well as our live shows are currently available in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
With live show formats in the Zalando app, we offer our customers a familiar and safe environment in which they can discover new products in a video format and save them directly to their wish list or add them to their shopping basket. At the same time, live shows are a great way to offer customers additional information in an engaging and fun way in which they can directly interact with the hosts to ask their questions. Especially our Beauty customers appreciate the additional level of information with Beauty live shows having the highest engagement rate among the different formats we offer.
Follow my Style, a new offering on Stories on Zalando
Since 2023, our customers can discover Stories on Zalando, an experience offering customers expertly curated content in visual-first formats like short videos, including seamless connections to purchasing inspiring products they truly love. Stories was created in collaboration with Highsnobiety and is currently available in 11 of our 25 markets.
Now we are taking our Stories experience to the next level by introducing “Follow my Style”, a dynamic feed of curated and relatable fashion and lifestyle inspiration and entertainment from today's icons and tastemakers. Customers can now explore Zalando through the lens of their favourite talent such as Caro Daur, Isamaya Ffrench or Sabrina Bahsoon, following their profiles for product recommendations and brand curations as well as shoppable outfits that are relevant to their interests and style. Each day customers can discover new product recommendations and get inspired by their icon’s taste and style.
Our new discovery journey pilot and Style It
With our new discovery journey pilot being tested in the UK and Czech Republic we’re offering customers a whole new way of discovering Zalando.
It takes the Zalando journey from a more classic shopping experience into an experience fully dedicated to playful entertainment and inspiration. For eligible customers in these markets, they can opt-in to this Beta experience via their Zalando mobile app and browse through a discovery journey that focuses on visual-first experiences, leveraging the existing content Zalando and partnered creators have produced and making it much more prominent. It also allows customers to save, share or react to content, by “loving” an item via emotive emoji’s, signalling that they’d like to see more content like this. Customers can switch between the regular Zalando experience and the new discovery experience in the app whenever they want.
Another particularly exciting new feature that is part of this in-app pilot is the Style It experience. Style It enables customers to generate outfits displayed on an avatar of their choice. It can be accessed through the dedicated Style It entry point within or via any compatible products they happen to be browsing within the Beta experience. Customers can choose what top, trousers/skirts and shoes they want to see styled together and through the use of AI, create a full look on the customer’s avatar of choice. Once their outfit is created, customers can add the products directly to their wishlist, share with friends/family/ to their socials or post their creation for others to discover within the experience.
The outfit builder is largely based on Zalando’s in-house models, developed by its research teams and marks Zalando’s second big customer experience powered by generative AI after the Zalando Assistant.
Boards on Zalando
Our most recent pilot on Zalando is the introduction of Boards in six different markets. Customers in Austria, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Finland can discover curated boards on Zalando, each dedicated to a specific topic or lifestyle theme. From “burgundy bliss”, “corporate core” and “best of denim" customers can immerse themselves in a diverse array of style inspirations that are being updated every two weeks. The board experience focuses on a visually appealing collection of product and outfit inspiration including video content formats.
Boards can relate to a colour, season trends, or wardrobe staples and offer customers a curated and inspiring product selection. Once saved by a customer the board will appear in their wishlist section so customers can come back and continue to discover their favourite board in a simple way.
All of these projects pay into Zalando’s goal of successfully combining inspiration, entertainment and e-commerce to offer customers the most relevant experience.
Find out more about other experiences in this area:
