Zalando to cut hundreds of jobs

The decline of e-commerce following the pandemic is now also affecting Zalando: the German fashion platform is to cut “several hundred” jobs due to a difficult economic context.

Simplify organisation

“We have decided to start a program that will remove several hundred overhead roles across many of our teams”, co-CEOs David Schneider and Robert Gentz reported in an update to employees. “Over the last few years, some parts of our company have expanded too much and we have added a degree of complexity to our organization that impacted our ability to act fast.”

Zalando experienced strong growth in 2020 and 2021, when the pandemic fuelled e-commerce sales worldwide. However, since 2022 there has been a downturn and the economic context became more difficult. In recent months, the company has already delayed hiring and made efforts to simplify the organisation, but this is not enough. Details on the number of redundancies and the timing of the operation cannot yet be given by the CEOs. “This is one of the most difficult decisions we had to take”, they add.