Developing an Always-on Creator Strategy for European Fashion Powerhouse, Zalando

The Brief:

Smarts’ Creator Hub manages every piece of content for Zalando's Instagram and TikTok channels, collaborating with 350+ influencers, creating 1,500+ pieces of content, and posting an average of twice a day.

The Zalando team came to Smarts Creator Hub with a brief focused on dialling up creator partnerships.

We were asked to help Zalando move from being seen as a functional platform to the starting point for style inspiration through a global, always-on creator community.

We took this on, and more:

Over the past year, we’ve worked with the fashion giant to take 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) – owning every step from ideation and sourcing, and trendspotting; to execution and content go-live, across 27 European markets.

Strategy and Implementation:

We curated a community of diverse and influential creators with a voice and a style to suit everyone — and empowered them to interpret briefs in their own fashion style, tone of voice and cultural steer.

Our casting for these creators was three-fold:

1. Powered by Data: We carefully 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 the content to drive real impact we 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. We fostered these relationships to in turn create unique and engaging content with brand messaging blended with creator individuality.

The creator strategy is underpinned by analysis of Zalando’s audience, content offering, creator partners, and competitor outputs using our industry leading data stack of tools, including Klear, Meltwater, GWI, Brandwatch, Collabary and Tagger.

An always-on execution model powers each channel – with our Creator Hub collaborating with both the Zalando team, and creators on the latest content trends, industry and platform updates – to provide new creator suggestions, as well as creative inspiration.

Results:

Our always-on strategy delivers authentic content that’s creator-led and culturally relevant; and combines seasonal, cultural, and reactive material.