Soren Johansen on Breaking New Ground in Fashion and Retail

At the height of summer, we sat down with Soren Johansen, Director of Connected Retail Technology, for a fascinating discussion of the growth that Connected Retail has undergone over the past year and a half, the future of online and physical shopping, and his teams’ hiring goals.

Hi Soren, could you introduce yourself to our readers?

I’m Soren, I am 43, I have two kids, and my wife and I relocated to Helsinki one and a half years ago. I work at Zalando Connected Retail where I’m heading up Product, Design and Technology. Basically, my job is about taking our projects from idea to value. It’s about using feedback, using data and coming up with great ideas to build a product and reap its benefits. Bringing in value is the essential part of what we do — the worst thing would be that we become a feature factory. That’s what we don’t want to be.

And for those of our readers who do not have any knowledge of Connected Retail, could you talk about it a bit?

Zalando’s Connected Retail offers the Zalando customer a depth of assortment and availability. We don’t want to create sold-out situations, we want to make sure that our customers get the product they want to get. We offer them a lot of choice and more locally relevant products. Next, we want to offer fast and convenient deliveries: same-day deliveries, next-day deliveries, we plan to introduce Click&Collect and the option to return orders in store. On top of that, we want to do what we do more sustainably. Summing up, Connected Retail has four focus points: availability, choice, convenience, and sustainability. With sustainability I mean that we’re capable of putting less miles into each delivery — we ship from around the corner instead of shipping from a warehouse, so the last mile becomes shorter. As for the physical retailers, we help them digitise their stores. Normally, a retailer gets customers from within a proximity of 30 kilometres, but we expose retailers to their whole country and even Europe in the future. We give them access to our +40 million customers — and that’s the best value we generate.

How do product and design teams in Connected Retail work?

We have an extensive research phase, followed by a design phase. We start with a question whether we even want to pursue a project. If we have limited data, or don’t understand the problem fully, we make early-stage decisions on whether to pursue it or not. If the project aligns well with the strategic direction of the company and Connected Retail, there’s probably value there. Then we take it a bit further, get more data, start quantifying and qualifying: “Does this make sense from a value perspective?”. And then we start designing, and then we start defining, and then we take it into implementation and developing stages, always following our 4D process.

What attracted you personally to Connected Retail?

In my view, there is no world in which shopping for fashion only takes place online. In five years from now, I’m sure, there will still be a tangible physical element to it, therefore integrating physical stores is the most natural and logical thing to do. Doing it as a platform is fresh and novel, I think we’re breaking new ground in fashion and retail. Also, the last year and a half has shown that even in crisis times for offline shopping, we were able to create digital opportunities for retailers. We need to continue to create a sustainable business model that is profitable for the stores. Or else, I’m afraid that we could have a very difficult time ahead for physical retail. The challenge of what we do and the urgency of it definitely keeps me motivated.

Why do physical stores matter?

A physical store is a place where both data and emotions accumulate. A retailer in the south of Italy would know exactly what sort of people they cater to. And I think we should be humble about whether we are capable of doing that in the same hyper-local way as the retailer serving a 30-kilometer proximity. I don’t think we can, but physical retailers can, they have been studying their local customers for decades, and they can use that knowledge online as well. We could provide a vehicle for them.

In the beginning of the pandemic, as Connected Retail onboarded so many new retailers to the platform, it still felt like an experiment. Now, a year and a half later, how do you think this experiment is going? What are the learnings that you have acquired along the way?

Oh, a big question. To start with some data points, we have very few retailers dropping out of Connected Retail, which shows that we serve the purpose. One of the learnings is that focusing on the needs of physical retailers is key. Another learning is that we need to offer as much control as we can to the retailers. They should be able to decide what they sell, when they sell, how much they sell, at what price — we need to give them maximum control to interact with the customer. The experiment worked. A big learning has been that an even stronger platform mindset is needed when doing this as scale.

Connected Retail has grown a lot — what does it mean for your current hiring status?

Over the past 12 months, we have tripled! And I expect us to grow just as fast in the future. Obviously, onboarding in a remote setting is hard. And — because we don’t meet at the coffee machine anymore — our communication within teams needs to be spot-on. Our chats need to be amazing. Our emails need to be clear. We need to talk a lot on Meets.

What kind of people are you looking for?

We only hire nice people. The point is that we don’t just hire for skills. You could be the greatest product manager or the greatest developer, but you don’t get a job unless you’re capable of collaborating with others. Collaboration is key.

And what should your fresh hires be ready for?

Someone coming into Connected Retail should be ready for high pace, hyper growth, and startup approach within a huge company. We have a startup mentality, but we are part of Zalando. And the paradox is that sometimes we have strategic freedom that people in big companies could only dream of, and sometimes we have set processes and fixed procedures. So, we have the benefits of a bigger company, combined with the freedom of a startup.