Founded in 2008 in Berlin, Zalando has grown from an online fashion retailer into a pan-European ecosystem for fashion and lifestyle, connecting millions of customers each year with thousands of big name brands, as well as its own private-label brands.
Sustainability has been intertwined with business operations at Zalando for more than a decade, and last year, the company published a report, It Takes Many, which explored a persistent attitude–behaviour gap in the fashion industry – that consumers want to shop more sustainably but face barriers such as price, difficulty identifying sustainable options, limited knowledge, and distrust in green claims.
The It Takes Many report came four years on from a previous report, It Takes Two, illustrating the evolution of sustainability into a shared responsibility involving brands, consumers, governments, the EU and myriad of other stakeholders.
At the recent Economist Impact Sustainability Week Europe summit in Amsterdam, Pascal Brun, vice-president of Sustainability and Diversity & Inclusion at Zalando, discussed the report in detail and examined how the circular economy, another passion for the company, can be expanded globally.
Defining ‘circular’ fashion
SustainabilityOnline caught up with him, and started by asking him for his definition of ‘circularity’ in a fashion industry context.
“I think it means different things for different companies,” he says. “For us, we define circularity as more of a business model, a business opportunity. I think it’s time to change the narrative – if we want circularity to scale, that’s the only way we can make it happen.
“It’s not about trying to add a few circular initiatives into a linear model and hoping it’ll change the industry. It’s about fundamentally changing how we work, how we do things. That’s how circularity should be taken into consideration.”
For circularity to gain cut through with consumers, however, a more nuanced approach will be necessary. As Brun explains, many consumers believe that circular – or sustainable – products cost more and therefore avoid them, even when that perception is inaccurate.
“Consumer behaviour evolves over time, and if you look at the current geopolitical and macroeconomic context, it’s not all that optimistic at the moment,” he says. “Consumers are more aware than ever about sustainability. They’re more willing than ever to live a sustainable lifestyle. But they also don’t trust what they read any more.”
This, in turn is hampered by inconsistent or unclear messaging around sustainability claims.
“There’s a mistrust about what’s presented as a sustainable product, or they simply don’t understand it,” Brun adds. “There’s no clear messaging any more. Five years ago, we were overflowing with messages, which created a whole other issue. Now, it’s a lack of messaging.”
Zalando has sought to simplify sustainability messaging for its customers by moving away from often-misunderstood green labelling, towards more transparent messaging.
“We are trying to present a clear message – what percentage of organic cotton is in a product, or what percentage of recycled polyester,” he says. “With that, there’s a need for education as well: why a product is organic, how we recycle cotton, and so on.
“There is a perception out there that using recycled materials affects the quality of the product, or affects the touch of the product. So there is an educational piece that needs to go with that simplified message.”
It Takes Many
The It Takes Many report identifies four consumer groups – Fashion First, Conscious Curators, Mindful Minimalists, and Indifferents – each of which have their own expectations and demands when it comes to shopping sustainably. Fashion-oriented and conscious shoppers tend to engage more with sustainability messaging, the report found, with some overlap between the two groups. Minimalists, meanwhile, tend to shop selectively and have fixed preferences, so sustainability messaging has limited impact on them.
“Regardless of what you tell them, they know what they want,” says Brun. “And then there are ones that no matter what message you put in front of them, you will not reach them.”
With this in mind, Zalando is aiming to create a baseline message that resonates to some degree with all customers while providing additional information for those who want to engage more deeply.
“We are trying to adjust the messaging, making it kind of unified for everyone,” says Brun. “For those that want to know more, there is an add-on. We know that Fashion First shoppers are more sustainable, so we will make it more visible for them. But the aim is to create a minimum viable message that will cover everyone.”
As well as guiding marketing strategy around sustainability perceptions, Zalando also focuses its messaging around product care and longevity, with tutorials how to better care for products capturing attention.
“The durability aspect is resonating with consumers, in a way that it hasn’t in the past,” says Brun. “That’s something that we want to investigate further.
“Before the It Takes Many report, we put together a ‘how to take care of your product’ 50-second video, which got a lot more views than we were anticipating. That was kind of overwhelming, because it told us that consumers are actually interested in knowing more – how to take care of their product, how to wash it, and how to dispose of it as well.”
Consumer confidence
At the same time, Brun acknowledges that it has been hard to shake many consumers’ broader concerns around the fashion industry, driven by negative headlines about fast-fashion and low-cost platforms – “unfortunately, there is a sort of blanket that covers everyone” he says. Zalando has sought to counter this by proactively working with brands that extol a more positive message.
“Brand curation is super important for us,” he says. “If you take brands like Nike, Adidas, Puma, Ralph Lauren, PVH – all are advancing on sustainability, and have been doing so for the past 15 to 20 years. We have aligned goals as well; we try to align our brands with our sustainability agenda, and advance together.”
Zalando also supports initiatives like Fashion Leap for Climate,”where we try to enable brands that don’t necessarily have the capacity to set science-based targets,” he adds. “Today, I’m quite proud to say that more than 70% of the carbon emissions of Zalando are covered by brands that have science-based targets. In the past, we have also withdrawn some brands from our platform because of non-compliance.
“I much prefer a ‘carrot’ than a ‘stick’ approach, I like to move the industry forward. Regulation is the ‘stick’, but we feel we have a role to play in guiding, supporting, holding hands, and pushing brands to get to a more sustainable agenda.”
Ultimately, Zalando’s scale enables it to drive collective value while advancing both its sustainability goals and those of the wider fashion industry – focusing on practical, scalable impact rather than individual brand efforts alone.
“What I like about Zalando is the capacity to be an enabler: enabling customers to make better choices through the platform in a compliant way, enabling brands to set and meet their science-based targets, enabling collaboration on supply chain decarbonisation, and enabling innovation.
“If you don’t have innovation, you can forget about being net zero. Zalando has a role to play in enabling these innovations to scale.”
Learn more about Zalando’s It Takes Many report by clicking here.
