Updated 3:07 p.m. ET on May 6
Artificial intelligence is helping Zalando progress, the company said as it revealed first-quarter results. Yet executives would not be drawn as to exactly how the online fashion giant was making financial improvements using it.
In the first three months of 2026, Zalando revenues grew 23.8 percent to 2.99 billion euros, reflecting what the company said was synergies from AI and its purchase of another German online retailer, About You, in 2025.
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When About You is taken out of the equation, Zalando revenues only grew 3.4 percent. Prior to the purchase of About You, which was finalized in the third quarter of last year, Zalando’s revenues had been growing around 7.6 percent on average quarterly.
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Zalando’s gross merchandise value, which measures how much inventory the platform has moved, rose 21.7 percent to 4.29 billion in the first three months of the year. Without About You, GMV would have grown 6 percent.
“We had a strong start to the spring season and consumer demand persists, despite the volatile geopolitical environment,” Zalando co-chief executive officer Robert Gentz told a video conference Wednesday.
The company had yet to see any major impact from the conflict in the Middle East, “The European consumer is very price sensitive and cautious but no more so than before the conflict started,” chief financial officer Anna Dimitrova noted.
In the quarter, Zalando had 62.3 million active customers who placed 69.5 million orders. That reflected increases of 18.8 percent and 18.7 percent respectively.
Zalando’s revenues and GMV were only slightly below market expectations and analysts from the likes of Barclays Bank, Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan called the results “reassuring” and “solid” although Thomas Maul of Frankfurt’s DZ Bank questioned the potential for higher profits.
In the first quarter, the company’s EBIT came in at minus 79.7 million euros, below consensus estimates.
On Wednesday, Zalando shares lost almost 10 percent in value in morning trading before inching back up again, closing down 1.73 percent.
Gentz spoke about how Zalando was using AI to advance its matchmaking system, which now advised shoppers on sportswear and beauty as well as fashion. “Last quarter, an impressive 10 million customers interacted with our AI assistants, up from 6 million across the whole of 2025,” he boasted.
AI was also helping speed up how fashion products were displayed online and enhancing Zalando’s all-important logistics systems. Currently Zalando operates 12 fulfilment centers in seven countries.
In January, the company announced the closure of one of the first centers it ever built, in Erfurt, eastern Germany. That will come with 2,700 job losses in that location.
But the company is also opening a new fulfilment center in Giessen, in western Germany, which should be fully operative by the end of 2027. This will use more automation, robots and AI.
Both the Erfurt and Giessen centers are the same size — 130,000 square meters — but local media report Giessen will only employ 1,700 people.
Additionally, Zalando now needs less human help with creative and marketing tasks. Executives previously said 90 percent of Zalando’s content production and marketing material is now AI-generated or assisted, with far less need for Photoshopping or cameras.
However, Dimitrova told WWD the company was “not focusing specifically on redundancies” through AI-led changes to improve its margins.
Lower profits during the first quarter were partially the result of the costs of restructuring and organizational efficiencies related to the About You purchase, Dimitrova said, and most of the expected future improvements would come from synergies brought about by the acquisition, including in commercial, logistical and payments areas.
“Those synergies are supporting us in delivering our mid-term EBIT margin,” she argued.
On the back of the first-quarter results, Zalando confirmed its guidance for the full year “across all metrics.”
It expects further growth over 2026, with revenue and GMV increasing somewhere between 12 and 17 percent. Zalando forecasts adjusted EBIT to come in between 660 million and 740 million euros.