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ΕλληνικάCASE STUDY
Zalando Sustainability journey
Context:
Zalando is a fashion retailer founded in 2008 in Berlin, Germany, and is nowadays a leading European online platform for fashion and lifestyle products. It started as an online shoe store, and nowadays counts over 17.000 employees that operate over 140 countries. Zalando is a growing company, with a strong financial performance over the last year, with an annual revenue for 2021 was 14.3 billion euros
Description:
One of the missions declared by Zalando is to support fashion that is produced, consumed and sold in a responsible manner. For this they have built an ambitious strategy that includes the following actions:
- MORE strategy for sustainability:
- Reducing the carbon footprint of the company: Zalando has committed to reduce scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 80 percent by 2025 against a 2017 base year, to increase annual sourcing of renewable electricity from 34 percent in 2017 to 100% by 2025, and to reduce scope 3 GHG emissions from private label products by 40 percent per million euros gross profit by 2025 from a 2018 base year. Zalando also committed that 90 percent of its suppliers will have science-based targets by 2025.
- Reimagining packaging and minimizing waste, by keeping material in use and eliminating single-use plastics by 2023.
- Providing sustainability-related product information
- By 2023, extending the life of at least 50 million fashion products by applying the principles of circularity
- Private label and code of conduct
Sourcing partners of Zalando are requested to agree to a code of conduct which sets the minimum standards that they must comply, including topics such as minimum wage, absence of forced labour, or freedom of association.
- Societal engagement and corporate citizenship`
Zalando is engaged in strategic partnership that strengthen the local communities. They support vostel.de, which is a volunteering platform, or collaborate with Ashoka, a network of social entrepreneurs, among other actions.
Lesson Learnt:
Zalando is clearly oriented to the financial profit, and in this sense, it cannot be considered as a good practice according to the criteria of the Economy of the Common Good. However, Zalando also gives an important place to its ESG strategy, with clear communication on its impact in terms of Sustainability, Diversity, and Inclusion. This strategy seems to work, considering the growing importance of this firm.
Note: In September 2022, Zalando won the inaugural greenwashing award of the Norwegian Consumer Council for 2022, for the reason of using a Sustainability filter on its website to classify the clothes, based on the Higg MSI index. This index is designed to compare the environmental impact of the materials used for the design of clothes, but Norwegian authorities recently said that the use of Higg labels is greenwashing, as it can give a false impression of sustainability while the use of the “sustainable” attribution should be strictly documented.