Zalando's Co-Founder Says Retail Is at an Inflection Point. Here Is What Comes Next.

David Schneider has spent 18 years building Zalando from a basement in Berlin into one of Europe''s largest fashion platforms. He opened the World Retail Congress 2026 not with a victory lap, but with a question: what can the rest of retail learn from what is happening right now?

His answer was direct. The consumer trends that retailers have been discussing for years have finally met the technology that can act on them. Personalization, speed, and convenience have moved from slideware to table stakes, and the gap between leaders and laggards is widening fast.

The 90% Problem

Schneider framed the moment with a single number. Roughly 90% of fashion shoppers in Zalando''s markets now expect a personalized experience by default, yet most retailers still serve them the same homepage, the same email, the same search results. The mismatch, he argued, is the single largest source of value left on the table in the industry.

Closing that gap is no longer a question of ambition. The models, the data infrastructure, and the operational muscle to act on personalization at scale are finally within reach for mid-sized players, not just the hyperscalers. The retailers who will pull ahead in the next 24 months are the ones who treat personalization as an operating system, not a campaign.

Speed Is the New Scale

The second theme of the keynote was speed. Zalando, Schneider noted, has had to learn that the cost of a slow decision is now higher than the cost of a wrong one. The company has restructured around smaller, accountable squads that own a customer outcome end to end, with the authority to ship, measure, and reverse course without committee.

That cultural shift, more than any single technology investment, is what he credits for Zalando''s ability to absorb a turbulent macro cycle without losing momentum on its long-term platform bets. Speed, in his framing, is not a sprint. It is the compounding interest of many small, reversible decisions.

AI as a Co-Worker, Not a Headline

Schneider was careful to separate the AI conversation from the AI hype. Generative tools are now embedded in how Zalando merchandises, writes product copy, plans assortments, and serves customer service. None of it makes a press release. All of it, he said, is starting to move the unit economics in ways that compound quietly.

The lesson he urged peers to take away was not to chase the most ambitious AI project on the slide deck, but to find the unglamorous workflow where AI removes a week of human effort and ship it next quarter. Do that ten times, and the business looks different a year later.

The Store, Reconsidered

Even for a pure-play that built its name online, Schneider was unsentimental about physical retail. Stores, he said, are not in decline. The stores that try to be catalogs are in decline. The ones that act as media, as service hubs, and as fulfillment nodes for a wider digital basket are quietly outperforming.

He pointed to partners across Europe who have started treating their store estate as the most expensive piece of marketing real estate they own, and have rebuilt the metrics around it accordingly. Footfall is no longer the headline number. Cross-channel contribution is.

What He Told the Room to Do on Monday

Schneider closed with a practical charge. Pick the three customer moments where you lose the most value today. Instrument them. Give a small team the budget and the air cover to ship a fix inside a quarter. Measure the outcome in customer behavior, not in internal milestones. Then do it again.

The message under the message was that the industry has spent too long waiting for a single transformation program to deliver clarity. Clarity, he argued, only ever arrives in the rearview mirror. Operators have to focus relentlessly on where they create value, and not wait for certainty before they move.

"It''s a lot of like this time where you test things, you learn, you iterate. It''s not always these impossible decisions. It''s really just doing stuff."

For a room full of retail leaders navigating one of the most uncertain periods in the industry''s history, it may have been the most practical thing said all morning.