The design secrets behind the buzz of Zalando Lounge
Do you design with scale in mind? Head of Design at Zalando Lounge, Brian Yeung, reveals the entrepreneurial approach driving the success of our online outlet.
It’s no wonder Brian Yeung, Head of Design at Zalando Lounge, describes our online shopping club as entrepreneurial. After all, the best entrepreneurial ideas are often a venn diagram of solving a problem, actively responding to consumer needs, and sustainably creating value in the long term. Part of the Offprice unit at Zalando, Lounge was established twelve years ago as an online solution to overstock. Since then, it has grown rapidly into an exciting curated shopping experience. The demand has loyal customers setting their alarms to snap up fashion and homeware brands at slashed prices. Lounge is so successful, in fact, that it’s the second largest Zalando organization, after the Fashion Store.
So how does Zalando Lounge work? And how has our product design community helped to shape it into such a resounding success? Brian Yeung shares how his team is working to deepen brand love through considered design.
How Zalando Lounge works
All of the Lounge campaigns are time-limited and typically available for three days. What does that mean for customers? Apart from the immediate appeal of a lower price, there’s also the thrill of the chase — a bit like a fashion treasure hunt. We want to bring excitement and entertainment into the online shopping experience by turning explore mode on. New deals come online at 7 am, and we have quite a few customers setting their alarms early to be the first to seize a deal — think online ticket sales for festivals. As a customer, you can grab great deals on the brands you love, or you can be bold and explore new ones.
We can offer great deals because the stock is limited — though this sometimes means that customers are competing with others. First come, first served. So it’s important that we manage expectations for new customers and explain how things work. It’s not an exclusive club for deal hunters, but for anyone who is into fashion and wants to broaden their horizons or deepen their brand love.
“As the organization is changing, design has an opportunity to influence larger organizational processes.”
How we’re growing
The model seems to be working really well, with the Offprice unit delivering 1.46 billion euros in revenue in 2021. And as demand keeps growing, so does our business. There are currently over a thousand tech, office, and warehouse colleagues supporting the operations behind Lounge. This makes us the second largest Zalando organization, after the Fashion Store. To put it in perspective, when I started at Zalando three years ago, we only had three Product Designers and one User Researcher on the team. There are now twenty people in the team, covering product design, user research, and content design. We’ve grown our skillset and seniority through a combination of team development, hiring, internal transfers, and promotion from within. In addition to our customer-facing web and apps, we now cover internal business tooling to ensure that all of our interfaces and processes enable our operationational teams to deliver the best possible customer experience.
We’re embracing change as we go along. For example, we recently reorganized into cross-functional and cross-journey teams focusing on different aspects of the customer experience, working closely with Product Managers, Product Analysts, and Engineers. As our projects get bigger and more complex, involving more teams, we keep improving our product development and portfolio management processes. Product design is one of the groups that are directly involved in evolving our processes and culture. This growth really reflects the overall scaling of Lounge as an organization. As the organization is changing, design is influencing our processes overall.
“I really appreciate being part of a large design leadership community. That’s not something you find very often, and it’s something I really value and embrace.”
How we scale Lounge with product design
The entrepreneurial feeling — more of a scaleup than a startup, but still with a lot of that excitement, drive and ambition — makes Lounge a bit like a small town within a much larger country: Zalando. We’re in a sweet spot at the moment. We all know each other, and we are in a position to work with our colleagues to define the brand and experience vision for Lounge, as well as to define our own design system, so it has that intimacy and sense of community. But we are also part of a much larger product design community, which supports our scaling and maturing journey as we start to connect Lounge more deeply to the other parts of Zalando.
As a leader, I really appreciate being part of a large design leadership community. That’s not something you find very often, and it’s something I really value and embrace. So even though we have room to grow our design maturity and design visibility, I am lucky to have a wider group of senior design peers with whom to have these conversations.
Interested in joining the Lounge team? View our current openings: Senior or Principal Product Designer (B2C or B2B), Senior or Principal UI Product Designer, Senior User Researcher, and Content Design Manager.
