Zalando addresses "complexity" of sustainable shopping with new features

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Apr 20, 2021

Zalando wants to make shopping sustainably easier for consumers and said research it conducted has shown that finding sustainable products is too complex at present.

It has published a report sharing consumer insights and recommendations on how to close the sustainability attitude-behaviour gap in fashion and launched a “values-based browsing experience”. 

Zalando said “every second consumer doesn’t understand what sustainability means in a fashion context”. So via a new experience in its fashion store, customers “are now able to browse based on the values they care about, such as water conservation, worker wellbeing, reusing materials, animal welfare, reducing emissions, and extending the life of fashion”.

It sustainable assortment consists of over 80,000 articles from more than 500 brands and the new browsing experience, should help consumers find them more easily.

It’s also further investing in its Pre-owned offer by expanding it to Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, and Sweden.

The new report, called It Takes Two: How the Industry and Consumers Can Close the Sustainability Attitude-Behavior Gap in Fashion, investigates the gap between attitudes and what consumers actually do. It shows that many of them “struggle to turn their sustainability priorities into fashion purchasing decisions”.

Based on consumer research carried out in France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and the UK, the report said the industry needs “to make sustainable choices more attractive, realistic, and accessible”.

The company wants 25% of its general merchandise value (GMV) to come from more sustainable products by 2023. During the coronavirus crisis, customers told it that shopping sustainably became more important to them than ever before. But when it asked them how they felt about sustainable fashion, the strongest association was ‘guilt’ and the weakest was ‘fun’, which suggests that there are considerable barriers to shopping sustainably.

The report said the fashion industry “must earn trust through simple and convincing communication, it must motivate changes in behaviour, and it must scale circularity and offer solutions to close the loop”.

The report also found that consumers are going to focus more on circularity in fashion over the next decade, including multiple topics such as recycling, reuse, resale, repair, and rentals.