Zalando Delivers Personalized Shopping Experiences at Scale

Faster go-to-market

with automated image cropping

Consistent visuals at scale

across platforms

Smarter assets

due to AI-driven tagging

ABOUT

Zalando

Founded in 2008 in Berlin, Zalando has evolved from an e-commerce pioneer into Europe’s leading online multi-brand fashion destination. Lounge by Zalando is a standalone shopping club within the Zalando Group where customers can purchase big-name brands at affordable prices. Registered customers can shop curated selections of limited-time promotional deals featuring fashion and lifestyle articles at discounted prices. It’s the perfect destination for brand partners to offer attractive discounts and connect with customers across 24 European countries.

THE CHALLENGE

Automation to Deliver a More Relevant, Personalized Shopping Experience

In the fashion and lifestyle industry, visual storytelling isn’t just powerful. It’s essential. Through engaging visual experiences, such as rich imagery and compelling videos, Zalando and its partner brands vividly communicate the stories behind the products. These visuals inspire customers, demonstrating precisely how each item aligns with their personal style and lifestyle needs.

To support this strategy, Zalando sought a solution to adapt digital assets on the fly and deliver multiple variants and resolutions across numerous platforms. Zalando needed an intelligent cropping tool capable of meeting the requirements of external platforms while ensuring its visuals remained compelling and high quality. Importantly, this process had to be fast and require minimal engineering support.

Industry Retail and Consumer Goods

Headquarters Berlin, Germany

Employees 15,000

“What I love most about Cloudinary’s features and capabilities is that they work out of the box — this creates trust.”

—Gaiar Baimuratov, Head of Demand Tech and Product, Lounge by Zalando

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

Sleek Asset Production With Intelligent Cropping and AI Tagging

Zalando uses Cloudinary’s automatic gravity algorithm (g_auto), which leverages deep learning to detect and focus on the most interesting part of an image. This replaces time-intensive manual cropping and enables automation that accelerates Zalando’s go-to-market capabilities. It also allows the company to repurpose existing assets across its various sites and marketing channels.

In addition, Zalando relies on Cloudinary’s advanced AI features to enhance asset management through detailed tagging and enrichment of metadata. These capabilities are becoming a key pillar in Zalando’s strategy to harness advanced AI in the near future.

“Cloudinary reduces the amount of required manual labor and helps us accelerate our go-to-market capabilities.”