The Zalando team came to Smarts to strengthen creator partnerships. We took this on, and more:

We’ve taken end-to-end ownership of the content and creator process for four key short-form channels (on Instagram @Zalando, @Zalando_beauty, @zalando_street and on TikTok @Zalando) – managing every step from ideation and sourcing, and trendspotting; to execution and content go-live, across 27 European markets.

Colleagues across Smarts work seamlessly with Zalando’s in-house team to deliver culturally relevant, always-on, short-form social content, with objectives to:

• Activate partnerships with 100 influencers /year

• Create a minimum of one new, engaging social post /day

• Drive sales and increase audience engagement

Our Creator Hub ethos allows creators an open brief – we provide guidance, including mock posts to inspire and guide, aligned with their content style and personality, as well as Zalando’s online persona – then ask them to create ‘concepts’, which they are able to interpret in their own fashion style, tone of voice and cultural steer.

By taking creators on this journey – from initial outreach, to briefing, concepts, item orders, content delivery, feedback and go-live – we deliver engaging content that performs, while granting creators freedom for expression.

Putting co-creation at the heart of Zalando’s content meant bringing the client on that journey too ... proving that allowing creators more freedom, didn’t mean losing control. We addressed this by exploring the type of content produced, e.g. though broad concepts; providing creators with clear content guidelines; and collaborating closely with them to ensure that they understood the campaign objectives.

We brought a new approach to the brand’s social content.

Analysing Zalando’s audience, current content offering, their creator partners, and competitor outputs provided the key insight to shape our Gen-Z focused short form content – consumers engage with fashion content for inspiration, but what was missing from Zalando’s content was the personality behind it. Posts that were too long, showcasing overly professionally produced campaign assets, with no engaging hook, were resulting in lower levels of engagement.

Who better to inject personality than our creators themselves – especially as we also know that brands that co-create in culture and six times more likely to grow (*Kantar Cultural Vibrancy research).

So we reshaped the brand’s social strategy: from weekly posts, giveaways and tag-a-friend CTA’s – to authentic content that’s culturally-relevant; combines seasonal, cultural, and reactive material; and creator-led, creator-centric and co-created.

With a large number of creators, and hundreds of pieces of short form content – ranging from TikTok videos, Instagram Reels, Instagram Posts to Instagram Stories – to create, we had to be laser-focused:

We centred our approach on creators who can provide a drumbeat of short form content throughout the year (with quick turnarounds).

Our casting for these creators was three-fold:

1. Powered by Data: We analysed the performance of their short form content to ensure they were able to create content for Zalando which performed.

2. Authenticity: From our research we knew for content to drive real impact it needed to show the person behind it so we needed to pair Zalando with authentic, transparent and ‘real’ creators to create genuine and credible content that has cultural impact.

3. Co-creation: We empowered our creators to create content they know works – they are the ones in culture.

An always-on execution model powered the content – collaborating with both the Zalando team, and the creators.

As a result of these two partnerships, one a step change for our client and the other a unique approach to working with creators, we transformed Zalando’s Instagram and TikTok channels:

• We were tasked with working with 100 creators, to create one piece of content per day – we worked with 350, and produced 700 pieces of content.

• The brand’s Instagram following grew by 110% (making Zalando the fastest growing brand on Instagram amongst its competitors) and TikTok followers increased by 18% (adding more than 250,000 followers).

• There were 96 million impressions on Zalando’s short form content.

• Creator-led content, that resonates with the Zalando audience, resulted in a 41% increase in engagement YOY (KPI was 5%) – with over 30m likes on TikTok alone.