Zalando - Most Innovative Woman of the Year

Company: Zalando, Berlin, Germany
Entry Submitted By: Smarts Agency
Company Description: Zalando is one of the world’s largest online fashion and lifestyle retailers. Zalando is a German multi national E-commerce company based in Berlin, Germany. The company follows a platform approach, offering fashion and lifestyle products to customers. It’s built a reputation for great service and a smart tech platform - but it's focus is on building an emotional connection with customers too.
Nomination Category: Individual Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Most Innovative Woman of the Year - Advertising, Marketing & Public Relations

Nomination Title: Natalie Wills

Natalie Wills joined Zalando – Europe’s largest online fashion platform – in 2020 and currently co-leads its 200-strong marketing team.

Her role is pivotal to driving Zalando’s vision of becoming the Starting Point for Fashion and a values-led, sustainable platform with a net-positive impact for people and the planet. In response to COVID-19 and the dominance of online consumerism, Natalie engineered transformative digital marketing strategies to drive genuine positive cultural change.

She believes her goals for Zalando are achievable by staying culturally relevant in order to connect emotionally with audiences and inspire, motivate and influence behavioral change.

To support this ambition, Natalie is an active public speaker on several topics, including: influencer marketing, social media, leadership and culture.

Natalie’s previous experience spans over 15 years’, building long-term brand equity through creative, strategic and disruptive communications for the likes of Diageo and Unilever.

In a year at Zalando, Natalie has rapidly risen through the ranks of one of the biggest successes in European ecommerce. She continues to inspire change through purpose-driven, talk-worthy campaigns that champion issues that matter.

Since Natalie joined Zalando, her achievements have been significant – ‘social first’, innovative thinking has been aligned with all communication activities, and she has been actively championing diversity in the fashion world. Key achievements include:

Several award-winning values-led campaigns including
'Here to Stay’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tklMEpmR1G4
‘Activists of Optimism’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk2m5Nhcwos and
'We Will Hug Again’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYLsVwlXj4g

Multiple initiatives to support Zalando’s sustainability strategy, including: The Attitude-Behaviour Gap Report “It takes two” to help turn beliefs into action when it comes to shopping sustainably; ‘The Academy’ – a platform to inspire more sustainable shopping; the partnership with Copenhagen Fashion Week to launch the Zalando Greenhouse – an interactive sustainability-focused website; and the subsequent launch of the ‘Zalando Sustainability Award’ to celebrate brands’ sustainability achievements.

https://corporate.zalando.com/en/attitude-behavior-gap-report

https://www.zalandogreenhouse.com/#

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/fashion/fashion-news/a36591385/zalando-copenhagen-sustainability-award-finalists-2021/

Real ‘social first’, innovative thinking aligned to Zalando’s culture strategy of being the place where fashion meets culture to inspire change. This culminated in: best practice real-time shopping on Facebook Live and Zalando’s launch on TikTok.

Zalando’s influencer strategy launch, to change the face of influencer marketing and cement diversity and inclusion at its core.

Zalando’sPre-Owned proposition launch and the brand’s expansion into six new Eastern European markets.https://corporate.zalando.com/en/newsroom/news-stories/zalando-sets-out-revolutionize-pre-owned-fashion-europe
The delivery of values-led campaigns have successfully championed diversity and self-expression to create uplifting, customer-first work across the last year. This has shown itself through tangible award winning results.

-The Zalando Greenhouse campaign has won two awards, reached an audience of 385M, generated +400 news articles and was covered in Vogue, Elle, Grazia, R29 and Harper’s Bazaar.

-‘Social first’, innovative thinking has enabled Zalando to grow its audience base significantly over the last year amounting to Zalando now being recognised as a top fashion channel with over 1.2M followers on Instagram. Achieving 1M followers on TikTok and over 15M likes in under one year. The pioneering use of Reels Remixes and community-led content championing Zalandos ‘social first’ initiative has seen amazing results across all platforms for the brand.

-Natalie has also brought to life Zalando’s influencer programme, through the Style Creator Program, partnering with 1,500 creators to drive fashion inspiration and celebrate self expression in 20 markets.

Natalie’s achievements are significant, as she leads on the diversity front in the fashion world, challenging stereotypes, tackling biases and shining a spotlight on the under-represented.

When you look at Zalando’s social presence, compared to other players in the industry, the refreshingly non-stereotypical fashion content is championed on every major platform. This has been brought to life through a plethora of hugely successful values-led campaigns and partnerships this year. The result? Transformational, purpose-driven work that’s benefiting people and the planet by creating a genuine cultural shift in the fashion industry.

Reference any attachments of supporting materials

Supporting material has been linked and attached throughout this nomination to further support all of the forward thinking and innovative work that is happening at Zalando – led by Natalie Wills.

We have included the campaign videos for ‘ Here to Stay’, ‘ Activists of Optimism’, and ‘ We Will Hug Again’ to showcase how inclusion, diversity and sustainability are at the heart of all communication activity undertaken at Zalando. These videos show in live time the championing of these initiatives.
Here to Stay, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tklMEpmR1G4
Activists of Optimism, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk2m5Nhcwos and
We Will Hug Again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYLsVwlXj4g

We have also attached links to the Zalando Greenhouse and the Copenhagen Fashion Week Sustainability award winner to demonstrate the impact on the fashion industry these initiatives are having in real life. Nikolaj Storm, the recent winner of Zalando’s Sustainability Award who impressed the judges by displaying the brand’s ethos of creating more sustainable styles, will now partner with Zalando SE to develop an exclusive collection that will further explore more sustainable solutions in fashion; available to Zalando’s 45 million customers across 23 European markets.https://www.linkedin.com/company/zalando/

We have linked our new pre-owned proposition, which Natalie launched in six Eastern European markets earlier this year. This move is indicative of how the brand is revolutionising pre-owned fashion in Europe – where customers can now shop and trade in pre-owned fashion directly on the Zalando platform.