Zalando Taps AI to Turbocharge Marketing and Trim Costs

AI Meets the Fashion Floor

European online fashion retailer Zalando is embracing generative AI to overhaul its marketing operations. By leveraging advanced AI tools, the company is producing campaign visuals, taglines, and other creative assets in a fraction of the time it took with traditional methods. The shift not only accelerates content creation—from weeks to just days—but also dramatically reduces costs by cutting back on third-party agency involvement. As part of a larger automation initiative across the business, Zalando’s move exemplifies how retailers are scaling AI applications beyond customer-facing chatbots to core business processes like branding and creative production.

Creative Strategy, Reimagined

Zalando’s CMO, Natalie Wills, emphasizes that AI is not replacing human creativity but enhancing it. The company now tests AI-generated campaigns internally and selectively rolls them out across 25 markets. With AI handling the heavy lifting on repetitive creative tasks, marketers can focus on higher-value strategic work. While the technology isn’t flawless—some assets still need human editing—Zalando views these growing pains as a worthy tradeoff for substantially faster turnaround and cost savings. The fashion platform joins a growing list of European retailers pushing generative AI deeper into operational pipelines, signaling a shift in how content is created, approved, and deployed.