Evolving Zalando's CX

The Mandate & Challenge

Building a future-proof vision for a system I was still learning

Two months into my tenure, I was appointed to spearhead Zalando's 5-Year Customer Experience Strategy, redefining the company's market position for 2028 and acting as the primary bridge between executive business goals and design strategy.

I was asked to build a 5-year vision for a product ecosystem I was still learning, while a strict internal NDA prevented deep collaboration. That constraint forced a different approach: external research, strategic foresight frameworks, and a decision-making process rigorous enough to hold up to SVP scrutiny without any of the usual bottom-up input.

Approach

From ambiguity to aligned, operationalized strategy

Used strategic foresight and market research to build a decision-making framework, forcing SVPs to align on Business Probability vs. Strategic Advantage. Six months of ambiguity collapsed into three agreed pillars.

Theme 1

High-fidelity inspiration

Richer, more personalised discovery.

Theme 2

GenAI integration

AI experiences that feel personal at scale.

Theme 3

Social commerce

Profiles, followership, and community.

Sacrificial Concepts · Presented to the Board, 2023

Making the future feel real enough to fund

Collaborated with two design agencies as strategic agitators, brought in specifically to push past what internal teams would self-censor. I defined the creative guardrails and managed the budget to co-create three sacrificial concepts, deliberately provocative, intentionally not production-ready. It worked. The Board moved from "interesting in principle" to committing a dedicated implementation workstream.

Strategic Narrative

Shaping the strategic narrative

Acted as Creative Director with a motion agency to produce three vision films, crafting a narrative arc that was provocative yet grounded in feasible tech. These became the cornerstone of the 2024 Markets Day press release.

Operationalising the Vision

From secret strategy to scaled execution

Once the NDA lifted, I led change management by forking the NDA strategy into a 20-designer workstream alongside VP product, product directors and design managers. I supported teams by bringing context to preserve the original strategic but also encouraging their ownership of the details to launch.

Problem → Solution

Turning strategic pillars into shipped experiences

9 features. One holistic app. I led the launch of inspiration Boards, GenAI avatars, user profiles, moderation frameworks, and social proofing patterns, partnering across feed, influencer, livestreaming, and AI Assistant teams to bring it all together.

01

Introducing Boards

Wishlist was Zalando's most-visited page, over 50% of sessions included it. But it was private, static, and a dead end. We redesigned it into Boards, a multi-list, social-ready experience where users can create themed collections, share them with friends, and follow influencers for inspiration. To make it work at scale, the team built moderation frameworks and shoppability patterns from scratch.

The result was 620k weekly active users, with 80% engagement on user-created boards.

View it live ↗

02

Introducing User Profiles

Zalando had tens of millions of customers, none of whom existed as people inside the app. A genuinely social, inspirational experience required users to actually show up in it. We designed and launched Zalando's first-ever user profiles, discoverable, followable, shoppable. The design challenge wasn't just the surface, it was deciding which social media patterns translated to e-commerce and which ones didn't. We iterated to find the line between familiar and right for context.

The result was 400k profiles created, with 5 pilot brand partners in the first cohort.

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03

GenAI Avatars

Launching virtual try-on meant answering a harder question first, what makes a good AI-generated avatar? Zalando had no AI content creation principles, we were the first team to define them. We assessed our brand's D&I commitments, defined quality and safety criteria, and built art direction guidelines for avatar generation. Then we designed a contained beta experience in limited markets to validate the quality bar.

The result was 36 beta AI models tested, with D&I principles established as a company first.

New Ways of Working

New muscles, built alongside the product.

As the strategy shifted, so did how we worked. Each new phase called for a different muscle, and we built it as we went rather than forcing the old process to stretch.

01

AI Art Direction flow

To scale Boards content without scaling cost, we built an AI-driven flow for generating cover art from a simple two-step prompt. Every live Board cover in the app is now AI-created, faster, cheaper, and consistently on-brand, without pulling design time away from higher-leverage work.

02

First Principles for Social × E-commerce

Leadership kept asking why this didn't look more like Instagram, the right question with the wrong assumption baked in. I developed a First Principles framework to answer it clearly, showing where social patterns translate to e-commerce and where they break, so we could stop relitigating the same debate.

03

Listening to users

Big strategic pivots live or die on how often you check them against real users, so I stood up a biweekly Gen Z research panel built around templated interview briefs and reusable summaries. That process is now supplemented by our Claude Research workflow, freeing the team for synthesis over logistics.

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Final Results

From a vision to a tested, rolled-out app experience