Zalando is a leading European online platform for fashion and lifestyle, founded 2008 in Berlin. With more than 51 million active users they sell fashion and lifestyle products to customers in 25 countries. Lukas H. is leading Zalando’s Corporate Development team and has used Inex One since 2019. This case study explores how Zalando uses Inex One’s platform to support M&A due diligence and corporate strategy research.

Zalando was using one of the traditional expert networks for market research during strategy and M&A processes. However, after experiencing issues with customer service, user interface and payment structure, Zalando switched to Inex One in 2019. This move significantly improved their workflow and ability to conduct expert interviews.

Zalando found Inex One to be customer-centric, offering transparent pricing, pay-as-you-go structure with no additional charges for extra services. This was a clear contrast to the traditional networks, which required large up-front payments with opaque credit systems and intransparent charges. Inex One’s model allows for comprehensive project cost estimates and for smaller projects to secure budgets for expert calls.

“The traditional expert networks make you buy loads of credits, but often in corporations it is used by multiple teams. It is really annoying to be the guy who has it on the budget and to then manage the usage. The pay-as-you-go method is way more transparent / easy to admin if you have big companies. Every team basically pays for what they need” - Lukas. H

How Zalando uses Inex One

Sourcing Independent Customer Insights: When evaluating potential acquisitions, Zalando wants to speak to independent customers - “not a list of customers provided by the company itself, as they may be a biased sample”. They use Inex One to find and speak to an unbiased sample of customers.

Collaborating with External Consultants: Zalando sometimes uses external consultants to assist with strategy and acquisition processes. In such cases, they can invite the consultants as third-party users to Inex One. This allows Lukas and his team to access the calls, review transcripts and form their own opinion, independently of the consultants. Retaining the transcripts is useful also for post-acquisition work.

The consultants do all the expert calls there, and you keep the transcripts and can AI chat with them. That's a really user-friendly feature. No other network offers that type of features. - Lukas. H

Ultimately, Zalando has found the key advantages of using Inex One’s platform to be the transparent pricing, the intuitive UI and time-saving AI features for transcript analysis.

Zalando is Europe’s leading online multi-brand fashion destination. Zalando is building a pan-European fashion and lifestyle e-commerce ecosystem, focusing on both B2C (inspiring multi-brand shopping for over 50M customers in 25 markets) and B2B (logistics, software, and services to support brands and retailers on and off their platform). Through their ecosystem vision, Zalando aims to enable positive change in the fashion and lifestyle industry.

Inex One is a market leader in B2B market research through expert interviews and surveys. The platform helps private equity, market research and corporate strategy teams access expert insights fast and flexibly, and accumulate internal knowledge repositories that are searchable with AI.

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