How Zalando is fighting off Amazon and building the Spotify of fashion

Ten years ago, Robert Gentz and David Schneider founded what has become Europe’s biggest fashion e-commerce player. Now, Amazon is targeting their turf, but the duo has bigger plans: an operating system for fashion. While the US and China have birthed technology tech goliaths like Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Alibaba and Tencent, Europe has produced only a handful of major internet success stories. Against the odds, German university friends Robert Gentz and David Schneider teamed up with Berlin-based start-up incubator Rocket Internet to launch Zalando, which, ten years later, has become one of the world’s largest fashion e-tailers with 2017 revenues of €4.5 billion ($5.3 billion), more than double the sales at Yoox Net-a-Porter. Read more…