Zalando Co-CEO: Building Europe's Fashion Giant, AI in Retail and the European Dream

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 having me. And of course, since you own the biggest kind of fashion thing, in the world, what do you what do you wear today? I'm very, very dark today. So everything that I wear, I actually got from Zalando's today. So It's a bit like Steve Jobs. Like your Yeah. And I start like in Norway. You kind of have to rest a little bit warmer. Good, good idea. 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, and 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 really found shoes quite quite interesting. 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 now investments into into for, like, a big idea selling shoes online, and then we got started. What, 20 flip flops a day. Were you you were packing them yourselves and sending them out? Or Yeah. Yeah. We, we we packed them ourselves. We, went to the post office and and really enjoyed every single customer, contact we had and every single conversation and just, and as well as, like, why did they actually go for for an online search for flip flops and why didn't they go to stores? And it was, very, very good insight. So that was mid mid two thousand eight, right before the Finnish crisis. But e commerce were was quite new at that stage. Right? Yeah. It was certainly …