Weave: Transforming the Zalando Experience

Anne Pascual at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/31ZvRjucuZY

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Zalando and its customer promises

[00:00:00] My name is Anne. I work at Zalando, based in Berlin, as the SVP Product Design. And I'm very excited to talk to you today about how we've been designing a better experience for our customers, providing a more personal and relevant way for them to explore and buy fashion and beauty products.

[00:00:18] To begin with, here's a quick overview of what to expect. I'd like to briefly introduce Zalando, talking about where we are coming from, what challenges we were facing and what we did to address them. Lastly, I'm going to finish by telling you where we're heading when it comes to creating remarkable experiences for customers across Europe.

[00:00:42] Let me start with the beginnings. Founded in 2008, we have grown from a Berlin-based startup selling flip-flops online to become a pan-European fashion, retail and services platform. Our vision is to be the starting point for fashion: having customers come to Zalando every time they think fashion, beauty and lifestyle. Over the last 12 months, more than 10 million active customers joined the Zalando platform, resulting in 44.5 million active customers at the end of the second quarter. Customers engaged a lot more frequently, with average orders per customer reaching a new all-time high, leading to a record amount of growth.

[00:01:27] Having a lot of customers come to Zalando definitely makes us proud and excited. What we're also aiming for, though, is to have deep relationships with these customers, moving away from being mainly a transactional service provider and rather serving and offering our customers even more, to play a bigger role in their life overall.

[00:01:51] From the start, our customers have been at the heart of everything we do. For them, we aim to inspire and to create the most remarkable shopping experience in fashion. Our formula for how to get there is what we promise our customers, the problems we solve for them around buying fashion and beauty products: serving a flawless assortment; providing inspiration and advice tailored in a unique way to every single customer; giving them a seamless experience, especially, but not only, when it comes to convenience; providing an experience of trust, where they control their personal data; being a sustainable platform; and, not to forget, welcoming everyone, no matter who they are, by creating an inclusive experience.

A brand that started to feel distant

[00:02:42] By delivering on all these customer promises, we aim to be the starting point for fashion. Looking back, though, we also had to overcome some challenges to get there. In the past, we set strict standards for experiences that were scaled across a very large number of teams and partners. And while the systematic approach really increased the consistency of our digital experience, it became less and less differentiated. We realized customers struggled to connect emotionally with Zalando and that our brand started to feel distant.

[00:03:19] Here's a couple of proof points. Three images from three catalogs, one of them from Zalando, the others from two competitors: really hard to distinguish. Or to put it differently, a customer told us that Zalando seems to be someone very conservative. A man that wears a suit, a strict suit, not too flipped, just something in the middle. And that's a juxtaposition with the role fashion can really play in customers' lives.

[00:03:52] Here's a customer from the UK who told us, "I've always bought clothes which I thought would make me feel more confident. This underlines all my fashion choices." So in order to overcome this distance that customers felt from Zalando as a brand, we also needed to get closer to our customers and understand their relationship to fashion better.

[00:04:15] Another quote, from a customer in Germany, tells us that clothing is how somebody defines herself: "It influences a lot of how I feel. It provides me with self-esteem and also with self-confidence." So what we learned out of that is that whether it is dressing up, dressing down or dressing appropriately, what we wear affects the way we feel. Fashion changes, and so does every individual's personal sense of fashion, which is prone to change over time. So really it isn't just about fashion. It is about how it makes people feel.

Personality, the care label and four core benefits

[00:04:58] So what did we take out of these learnings, these observations from our customers, and the realization that we needed to become more distinct and create a more personal connection to our customers? Here's what we did to evolve our core experience. The first note we took away was that we needed to stop only selling our customers clothes, and rather tell them stories, create experiences, memorable moments they wouldn't forget.

[00:05:27] And the second note to self is that in order for humans to create a relationship between themselves and a brand, the brand needs to portray a particular personality, with specific values and symbols attached to it. That's why we invested first in understanding what our personality is and how we bring it across. One symbol, one metaphor that guided us, was the idea of the care label: moving away from just focusing on the brand and rather on how something is made, where it's been made, the material, and tapping into the real and big conversations about fashion in the real context and use of our customers.

[00:06:11] We derived a couple of key visual attributes to reflect our personality better. Introducing fun pairings, thinking about color and how we would depict certain colors in the imagery and the assets in our experience. And lastly, leveraging iconography to create a much more inclusive and accessible experience overall. But visual changes wouldn't have been enough for us.

[00:06:38] Instead, we thought about what the core benefits are that we want to be known for. What do we want our customers to realize, when they open our app, about what they could do by engaging with Zalando? We wanted to, first, think about how customers could make the Zalando experience their own; second, how they could discover brands they love; third, how they could close the circle; and fourth, get the Plus treatment.

[00:07:11] Let me introduce you to each of these benefits in more detail. Make it your own is about the promise to create an experience made for you that nobody else gets: style recommendations, advice based on your life, what fits, the weather and even the fashion you already own. Discover your brands: whether you're into the latest, the newest brands and trends from the world of fashion, you get them until you find something perfect.

[00:07:43] Close the circle invites you to buy pre-owned items or sell us the items you no longer wear. We do all the hard work and you get credit on Zalando and the warm, fuzzy feeling of doing something good. And lastly, if you're one of our most loyal customers, Plus customers, you get the Plus treatment. It means that you're never going to miss out, that you get first access to exclusive items and offers, and that you get premium delivery and a personal stylist who comes to you with tailored advice.

Delivering the benefits: size and fit, brands and browse

[00:08:19] So how did we realize these benefits? Earlier this year, we launched a set of new experiences, a set of improvements to our core customer experience, and repositioned it around these benefits. We've been pivoting from our mainly transactional experience to becoming a lot more engaging and differentiating, answering customer needs specific to fashion and beauty.

[00:08:47] Here's one example. Finding something that fits is one of the most common and important customer problems when buying fashion online. That's why we've been investing for many years in solving size- and fit-related customer problems. As of now, already 50% of all items ordered on Zalando had size advice and recommendations offered to our customers. With this new size and style profile, we allow our customers to make the experience their own by entering their details once, and then when rediscovering the catalog, the customer gets a unique catalog just made for them, without having to re-enter tedious types of information every time they look at a single product.

[00:09:38] Discover your brands finally provides our brands a stage to really celebrate the stories, the campaigns, the collections that they are launching on Zalando. And as a very big fan of a brand, you can also follow it and get notified if there's a new product launching, so you never miss out. This is really a win-win, not just for the customer, but also for our partners, who can therefore connect more directly with the customer base on Zalando.

[00:10:10] And here's another example of how we make our large assortment and our flawless selection really discoverable for our customers. Later this year, we're going to launch what we call Fashion Driven Browse: visual entry points to the assortment, creating fashion-specific dimensions. For instance, how you discover a dress, boiling down the selection to a manageable amount. As of today, if I look for a dress, I can get over 20,000 results via search. By using these little cards, I get offered specific cuts, materials, lengths, shapes.

[00:10:50] So as a fashion-confident customer, I know exactly where I can go to find the right dress. If I'm not so confident and competent, I get an explanation of what these specific dimensions could mean to me. So again, every customer gets a distinct set of products, offered around diverse dimensions, and through these visual entry points the whole catalog becomes a lot less like a grid and a lot more engaging.

Pre-owned and the Plus treatment

[00:11:23] Close the circle. We're very proud that exactly one year ago we launched Pre-owned, the ability to answer our consumers' interest in buying items that somebody else is no longer wearing. It really represents one of the biggest achievements in our sustainability commitment, the net positive impact that we seek to make. Pre-owned has been the category that attracted the largest number of first-time online shoppers. And this is especially true for the younger audiences, Gen Z and millennials. They are asking for affordable and sustainable fashion, and yet expect flawless quality and best-in-class e-commerce convenience, which they can now find on Zalando.

[00:12:08] But that's not enough. We also offer those customers the ability to trade in items they no longer wear, uploading any item, not just those they bought on Zalando before, to sell back to Zalando, get credit, and hence always make space in their wardrobe for things they actually like to wear.

[00:12:29] Get the Plus treatment. Plus is our subscription model that gives customers the best service and best experience we have to offer in exchange for an annual fee. So far, the main benefit has been prioritized shipping, and that's been really appreciated, showing high results in customer satisfaction. We wanted to offer more than just convenience to our Plus customers, though, and hence by now they get early access to sales and an exclusive assortment and can anticipate that they get the very special treatment. And we see great results, with items we offer only to them selling out within an hour.

Beauty and where we're heading

[00:13:13] So this is what we have achieved so far, improving our core experience. But we've looked ahead, and we're thinking about additional opportunities to engage our customers. One thing we learned and realized is that fashion brings a certain set of customer problems around buying garments and clothing. I mentioned size and fit, discoverability of brands, et cetera. But thinking about one part of our assortment, we realized that there was more we could do and had to get smart about. And this is beauty.

[00:13:49] Beauty is a very personal topic. Here's a customer from Italy who mentioned that one of the small routine moments that brings comfort is when she has a "me" moment using her favorite coconut scrub, a fragrance that relaxes her and reminds her of how she likes to wind down after a very long day in the office, and especially after the end of a very long, busy week. Beauty products are meant to create small moments of self-care. And we learned that during the pandemic in particular, but more so in general, the transition to online shopping by Gen Z audiences opens up new opportunities to provide a distinct beauty experience.

[00:14:37] Beauty shopping is a multisensory experience, given the different textures, color shades on individual skin types, and fragrances the products have. And that's why beauty products require inspiration, guidance, assurance, and oftentimes testing before a purchase decision is made. We want to showcase the different subcategories of beauty products by providing these different kinds of information and storytelling, drawing customers in to understand what ingredients care products can contain, what color palette may suit them or what emotion a fragrance might evoke.

[00:15:14] Beauty is also the space where more and more different forms of advice are appreciated. That's why we aim to provide a tailored level of advice, allowing customers to assess their personal skin and hair profile. But also, as you can see on the slides, having experts and enthusiasts share what they can't live without, sharing their tips and routines, which relates to everything from ratings and reviews to tutorials.

[00:15:41] So customers don't need to go to two different stores, one for fashion and one for beauty; we have this one destination offering both. So it's rather easy and pleasant, as described here: the beauty-focused experience, with very differentiated functionality, but also communication and marketing, which is complementary to our fashion-specific proposition.

[00:16:07] What we see with beauty, we believe can also work in other parts of the assortment: celebrating the unique selection we offer, the partnerships we have with small and large brands, the level of advice and inspiration we can provide, engaging customers by understanding them better, offering them more and therefore meaning more. This is what we're most excited about: creating the most compelling and relevant customer experience for fashion and beauty across Europe. Enough of the words. Let me show you in motion what our vision looks like, putting together all these things I talked about. Enjoy. Thanks for listening and for your attention.