01
Zalando | UX Outlook
Shaping the 5-year consumer experience vision through strategic foresight, co-creation, and cultural trend analysis.
Role:
Design Lead
Industry:
e-commerce
Duration:
5 months
Challenges
Zalando is a leading European online platform for fashion and lifestyle. It connects customers, brands, and partners across 17 European countries and 50+ million customers. As a large scale organization, Zalando has a practice of creating 5 year Operational Plans to guide our strategic direction. For the 2028 Operational Plan, I led a customer experience strategic vision with the goal of answering:
How might we ensure Zalando’s strategy evolves to meet the needs of a dynamic, creative, and tech-savvy customer in 2028?
My Approach
Where to start
Mapped cultural and technological shifts influencing Gen Z, fashion, and e-commerce behavior.
Conducted internal interviews, trend sprints, and competitive analysis to build a holistic view of the experience landscape.
Ensure we ask the right strategic questions by partnering with internal research, R&D, and product teams to gather insights and needs.
Design Thinking as Strategy
I used design-led foresight tools to move from uncertainty to clarity:
Impact Matrix: Aligned investment with value and longevity.
Futures Frameworks: Positioned responses to weak and strong signals across internal and external ecosystems.
Co-creation workshops: Enabled product, engineering, and strategy leaders to align on shared futures.
Designing Provocations
I created provocative prototypes and strategic artefacts to inspire action:
Collaborated with external agencies to create speculative UX scenarios and strategic design provocations.
Produced early research concepts around new shopping behaviors (e.g., Try Before You Buy), gamified content, and new trust rituals.
Synthesized outputs into a vision deck and immersive video, delivering a tangible future direction for Zalando’s executive team.
Sharing the Vision
Delivered vision artifacts in Capital Markets Day 2024, where the experience strategy was shared with investors and the public.
Ran internal showcases and workshops to socialize the vision and connect it to ongoing product work.
Results
The customer experience vision was presented in Zalando’s 2024 Strategy Update to investors and the public market. The future customer experience vision was directly integrated into 2025–2026 strategy planning, and experience principles were translated into product priorities across teams. This work inspired new concepts in content, trust, and Gen Z engagement already being prototyped and tested.
Check out one of the 4 vision videos created below.
Future Plans
Embedding this foresight work into Zalando’s long-term planning cycles and org design.
Created a bi-weekly Gen Z research panel to test new concepts early and often.
Exploring AI-enabled shopping experiences, the pivot from transactional to inspirational journeys, , and community co-creation as next provocations.
Conclusion
The customer experience vision was presented in Zalando’s 2024 Strategy Update to investors and the public market, with the announcement leading to a 12.3% stock price increase. Opportunities identified were translated into roadmap projects over the next 2 years.
Hear more about my approach in my talk, Seeing Through the Hype, below.