A convenience truth: bringing sustainability and design ethics to fashion
Head of Product Design for Sustainability, Ben Lowdon, shares his thoughts on finding ethical meaning in design at Zalando.
How did you come to be Head of Product Design for Sustainability at Zalando?
I’ve been working in product design for quite a while now, and this has taken me into different fields — from Interiors, Cartography, Datavisualisation to Smart Cities. But I started to find myself asking different kinds of questions. Less about what a product needed to deliver, customer problems, or what the company wanted to achieve, so much as the social implications of what we were building. I don’t have a background in social sciences, so I wasn’t trained to ask such questions. And there’s usually no time, nor the license to investigate the broader impact during the typical design process. In the triad of Product, Engineering and Design we make snap product decisions, and usually without considering how these affect people or the planet in the longer term. But these types of niggling questions started to form into a more critical mindset.
I’d say that I didn’t properly discover my own values until I was in my 20s. But, as that awareness has developed, integrity has become central to how I think about my role — what it actually means to be people-centered as a designer and manager. We all have our own lines, but this informs both my own approach and who I’m prepared to work with.
Was there a turning point in your journey in this respect?
Five or six years ago, I was lucky to meet a brilliant Ethicist (Maya Indira Ganesh from Tactical Tech), who I invited to talk to our global design team about how to map out ethical impact. Over the period we worked together, this provided the language and tools to have better conversations with our product and engineering peers. These were the first steps towards being much more intentional about what we were willing to work on. Shortly afterwards, we pulled out of a profitable pilot we were about to run, when we discovered the client’s intended use (I won’t go into details). This clashed with our newly clarified organisational ethics, and pulling out of this was a defining moment for me and the team.
So, you came to Zalando?
Every designer, regardless of their values, wants to solve challenging problems. Fashion is a really complex area in terms of sustainability, which means tackling some big systemic problems. Big challenges demand more robust approaches. In terms of design practice, that’s really exciting. And by developing these products you get to engage with issues that really matter and have an impact. When the role came up at Zalando I saw an opportunity to do this, working at the intersection between principles and practice in an industry where my experience can really make a difference.
Were there any defining moments?
In a way, yes. During the time I was initially talking to Zalando, I sat in on a talk by Rubin Ritter, then one of the Zalando CEOs. Here he directly addressed the fact that there are systemic issues in Fashion that Zalando is not going to shy away from. And I thought, “okay, they get it… There’s real commitment from the very top to tackle these issues head on”. This showed to me Zalando was engaging in some of the critical conversations I was seeking to have, and that I could bring my values to the workplace.
At the same time, a few friends challenged how I could reconcile my values with working in fashion. But for me, going inside a large organisation like Zalando and working on the inside to change an industry, gives you an incredible amount of leverage. You can amplify positive impact because of the scale of your influence on partners and brands. Not to mention the buying preferences, attitudes and behaviours of millions of customers all across Europe.
How is sustainability delivered or experienced within Zalando, and how is this different to what you experienced before?
I’d say being encouraged to ask critical questions is the biggest difference. No one wants to be the person banging a tin drum through the corridors if no one is really listening. You end up becoming frustrated, isolated (or worse, the unpopular prophet of doom). There’s only so much an individual agent can achieve where there is no wider commitment. But where there is, there is much more leverage and impact. I’ll provide an example: now when critical product decisions are taken there is expectation that we consider sustainability, and broader ethical issues (such as Diversity & Inclusion). Because these are ‘part of the bureaucracy’, business decisions are not made in isolation from impact or ethics. Business strategy engages with issues that matter, which defines the objectives of the problems we solve and the products we build. It all joins up.
How do you explain this level of commitment at Zalando?
Zalando is a young company, and very much in touch with its customer base. It has also come to maturity alongside a generation that increasingly cares about people and the planet, and at a time when the world is taking sustainability more seriously. As a company that pays a lot of attention to its customers, partners and its own values, I think this shows great strategic business sense. Actually, as Rubin Ritter himself put it: “Companies that have a compelling business model, appeal to the customer, and are sustainable have a bright future”. These problems are not going away, so to have a robust policy and commitment in place is both savvy as well as critical in terms of engaging with some unavoidable truths.
Can you give an example of this commitment to sustainability in action at Zalando?
We’re developing a number of initiatives to make sustainability a more conscious and convenient choice on the platform. Convenience as a concept carries strong associations with thoughtless, disposable consumerism, be this online or off. But we want to turn this idea on its head, exploring ways to bring the same convenience to a subject that many consumers have difficulty engaging with meaningfully. Customer research shows a substantial gap between what people feel about sustainability and what they actually do while shopping (it’s called the attitude behaviour gap). Why is that? We have found from talking to customers that sustainability is one of their top drivers, but it’s a complex, confusing topic, and it can be difficult to know how to make a positive impact. Our job as designers is to understand this complexity and try to enable customers to make better decisions without making it so simple that we’re blocking their learning. We have a collective responsibility and handshake that needs to be honoured.
Values-based browsing, an initiative we launched earlier this year, attempts to address this gap. This is designed to help customers understand fashion according to the causes they care most about. Be it Water Conservation, Worker Wellbeing, Reusing Materials, Animal Welfare, Reducing Emissions, and Extending the Life of Fashion, we give customers the chance to deepen their understanding, and make informed choices defined by their values. By making more sustainable choices visible, concrete and convenient, we can help normalise such behaviours, and have a bigger impact.
And what about Zalando’s role within the fashion industry?
A lot needs to change in the fashion industry in terms of sustainability and ethical standards.
As a platform, we provide opportunities for partner brands to communicate their efforts, giving them greater visibility and exposure because of our size. Exposure to a vast customer base, but also exposure to these customers’ scrutiny. You could say it’s part of the deal. As consumers become more conscious and demanding, brands increasingly need to work harder to get their house in order when it comes to sustainability.
Our size also enables us to set standards on an industry level. We recently collaborated on the Sustainable Apparel Coalition’s Higg index Sustainability profile. This implements an industry standard and aims to help make sustainability assessment mandatory for all brands selling on our platform. Product Design is a key stakeholder here, enabling brands with different objectives to collaborate on systemic problems which will help customers across the industry make better choices.
How do you see sustainability developing within the fashion industry?
I can’t speak for the industry as a whole, but I can say what it feels like to be engaging with these issues at Zalando, seeing the company steadily transition to a better place.
Sustainability is a systemic problem, which means that companies that are future-focused really do need to step up as global citizens and face up to these challenges in meaningful ways. For example, circularity needs to be addressed convincingly by producers and retailers. The whole take-make-waste cycle is literally unsustainable, so something has to change. In fashion, this is a very big question, and it’s not necessarily being driven by customer sentiment. It’s something we at Zalando have chosen to address by exploring new business models. As Product Designers, we can support the development of these new models in ways that are made relevant to customers within the fashion retail experience. So when we create something like ‘pre-owned’ as an option on the platform, we’re enabling people across markets to shop in different ways, and help transition the company and also the industry.
It constantly feels like we’re working on fragments of a future version of Zalando. Whether self initiated or driven by directives like the EU’s Green Claims initiative, industries must become more aware, more sustainable and more transparent. Zalando has signalled its commitment to do this in very tangible ways.
I’d add that none of the initiatives I’ve referenced are total solutions. But combined they steadily build towards meaningful progress. Stepping stones on a journey where all roads must tend.
