How A €10B+ ARR European FashionTech Company Built Its Ops and Tech Leadership
Zalando has trained a large pool of ops and tech talent capable of scaling complex, high-growth businesses.
In a previous piece, we found that Delivery Hero and HelloFresh recruited from Zalando to build their ops and tech leadership. Not only do they compete in the same market, but they also share the same leadership gene pool.
Like the two other companies, Zalando has produced a generation of leaders who know how to run consumer businesses at scale and who are now carrying that knowledge into industries that never had it.
Several readers suggested we look at the fashion tech company to make the comparison more useful. Fair point, so we did.
In total, we identified 236 current and former ops and tech leaders, from Head to C-level, in Europe. Then, we looked at the ops/tech split, where Zalando sources its talent and where its leaders go next to see how the company stacks up against Delivery Hero and HelloFresh.
We also spoke with Anthony Brew, who led Zalando’s Natural Language Processing centre of excellence and served on the supervisory board for two years, and Snir Yarom, who led the engineering department of Zalando’s supply retail operations business unit. Thank you both for contributing!
This report was compiled in collaboration with the Consumer Practice at The Big Search. If you’re interested in leadership and talent trends, looking to hire a Consumer leader, or simply want to discuss the findings, feel free to reach out: sahar@thebigsearch.com or Sahar Powell (PhD).
Zalando leans more toward tech leadership than ops leadership
Zalando’s AI focus
68.1% of Zalando’s current leaders sit on the tech side, spanning engineering, data, analytics, AI, and applied science. In that sense, Zalando and Delivery Hero are similar.
Early on, Eric Bowman, former VP of Engineering, led the engineering function. Jim Freeman became the first formal CTO appointed to the Management Board in 2019, joining from Amazon, where he led Prime Video and Alexa.
Following Freeman’s departure in 2023, Zalando chose not to appoint a successor CTO. Instead, the tech organisation operates through multiple VPs of Engineering, Technology, and AI, reporting to Graeme Smith, SVP Engineering & Science.
We also found that Data/Applied Science, AI, and ML roles account for 23% of Zalando’s tech leadership positions. Like Delivery Hero, Zalando runs a multi-app ecosystem. Each app targets a distinct segment of the European lifestyle market but operates on a shared data platform. That makes it easier to roll out improvements simultaneously, including AI features to enrich the shopping experience with better product information and inspiration.
Several current leaders we spoke with said AI and data teams at Zalando are held accountable for outcomes. LLMs and multimodal AI are being embedded directly into the company’s growth and customer engagement strategies, driving the numbers: Zalando is forecasting a 12–25% jump in full-year adjusted operating profit, in part driven by AI.
In practice, this spans conversational AI (the Zalando Assistant lets shoppers search for outfits in natural language), AI-generated outfit creation, sizing support to reduce returns, livestream-based discovery, and 3D and vision-based trend recognition.
For any business that depends on product images, ads, or marketing assets, Zalando is a useful benchmark: a multi-billion-euro retailer showing the positive impact of AI-driven visual commerce. Zalando is scaling contextual imagery, product videos, and virtual fitting rooms, using generative AI to produce content that informs and inspires at the same time.
Behind the Tech: ZEOS and the ops backbone
All three apps run on Zalando’s warehouse network, ZEOS. Zalando understood early that competing with Amazon in Europe meant controlling logistics and fulfilment – much like HelloFresh, with its vertically integrated supply chain.
The model centres on a single stock pool. Rather than splitting inventory across separate warehouses for each app, brands ship their stock to a ZEOS fulfilment centre, which can serve orders across all three apps from the same inventory. The result is an ops leadership structure that spans supply, sourcing, logistics, and facilities management. Volker Bergner leads ZEOS, while Masood Chaudhry oversees the end-to-end fulfilment process.
We also read that Zalando is transitioning away from some of its legacy infrastructure – closing the Brieselang and Erfurt fulfilment centres – in favour of new facilities built to handle advanced automation and the complexity of both B2B and B2C operations. But don’t get us wrong; automation was already part of its logistics well before this shift.
“The automation of the warehouses in Halle and Erfurt was the core of what we did. “Connected retail” meant full automation from supplier to customer. Warehouse automation existed before AI.” - Snir Yarom, former Director of Engineering.
For consumer businesses running their own facilities, this shift is inevitable if you want to scale the quality, quantity, and complexity of your logistics. It demands ops leaders who can (1) embed these tools without sacrificing flexibility, (2) maintain capital efficiency through rapid scaling, and (3) turn operational experience into compounding capability.
Where does Zalando source its ops & tech leadership?
To compete with Amazon in Europe, you need people who know the playbook firsthand. That’s why 10% of Zalando’s current and former ops and tech leaders have worked at Amazon at some point in their careers.
Beyond that, most come from consumer environments: Marketplaces and e-commerce account for 28.4% of the talent pool, followed by retail and FMCG at 17.4%. Four leaders also came directly from Delivery Hero.
And where HelloFresh drew on industrial and automotive backgrounds to build its ops leadership, Zalando leaned toward logistics and transportation experience to run ZEOS.
Fashion is a minor thread: only 15.7% of leaders had a fashion background before joining, mostly from retail brands such as H&M, Gap, and Adidas.
Like HelloFresh and Delivery Hero, Zalando has trained a large pool of ops and tech talent capable of scaling complex, high-growth businesses.
The two most common destinations are ASOS.com and Best Secret, but neither is a surprise, given the overlap in their business models. Beyond those, Zalando alumni work for a wide range of companies: B2C platforms like Delivery Hero and HelloFresh; retail and lifestyle groups such as Wayfair, Adidas, Tesco, and Intersport; adjacent sectors like fintechs (N26 and Tide); and DeepTech companies like Circus Group.
And their influence in those next roles is significant: 38.9% hold C-level positions, among them, Przemek Czarnecki as CTO at ASOS, Snir Yarom as CTO at Taxfix, and Stacia Carr as CTPO at Vestiaire Collective.
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Really interesting breakdown of how Zalando scaled both tech and logistics so aggressively. Their AI-driven shopping experience is honestly changing the way people browse fashion online.
I was actually searching for a working discount code for Zalando recently while shopping, and it’s surprising how difficult it is to find updated ones these days. I ended up finding some updated offers and promo deals on https://rabattcodewelt.de/, which seems to regularly post active Zalando discount codes and fashion savings.