HIGHLIGHTS: Robert Gentz - Co-CEO of Zalando

Hi, everybody. Tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi, everyone. I'm Nicola Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sew and Wealth Fund. And today, I'm here with Robert Gents, who is visiting us in Oslo. And Robert is the cofounder and co CEO of Zalando, which is, of course, as you know, all of you, Europe's leading online fashion platform. Robert started Zalando in 2008 right as the financial crisis hit, and most people thought that selling shoes online was a terrible idea. But now, seventeen years later, Zalando serves more than 50,000,000 customers across 25 European markets. We own a lot of shares in this company, and it's really exciting to have you here. Yeah. Thank you so much for for inviting me and helping me. Now, Rob, let's go back to the start. You founded, Zalando in 2008, just as the financial crisis, was kind of hitting the world. So tell me about the very start. Before we started Zalando, like, me and my cofounder David, we started, like, a a social media, company in, in Latin America. So which was, like, you know, student network for, in Mexico, Argentina, Chile. And this was, like, a startup that didn't really work out. So and then we said, okay. Well, that that shouldn't be it. So we actually wanted to actually try it one more time. And, we came back to Europe and thought, okay. Well, in ecommerce with soft goods, there's actually very great opportunity here in Europe. And, we we looked into various categories and and fashion and and and we found shoes quite quite interesting. Mhmm. And, in June 2008, we started to sell flip flops on a domain called Flip Flops three, and really worked out well. Consumers really liked it. It really picked up, like, to whatever, like, 20 flip flops a day. Based on this insight, we got our investments into into for, like, a big idea selling shoes online, and then we got started. When did you realize that there was, potential beyond the shoe category? The scaling of the London happened extremely fast. So we went from like, in 2009, we had, probably, like, 5,000,000 in revenue, 6,000,000 revenues, then we went to 150 in the in the next year, then more than 500,000,000 Wow. And then more than 1,200,000,000.0 in the fourth year. Wow. So we literally went from 50 people, in in 2009 to 2011. We were like more than two and a half thousand employees. Wow. So the the scaling went very fast because then we realized that we have this flywheel going for us, yeah, so we started off with shoes, and then we understood, you know, the more you provide selection, actually, the better you can you could actually convert the traffic, so better you could create the experience for customers. So we really had to just, I mean, scale …